My G5 Is Under Repair…, I'm a poor lonesome moderator Options

[lepetitmartien]

Well, I wasn't a lot around for 8 days as my G5 1.8 from 2003 decided to freeze on spot since last wednesday. It freezed at choice during boot (rotating thing), loading OS X (blue screen) or right during/after login.

The lithium battery was dead but not at first when I checked it, when I could change it it went slightly more "normal" as I could try to start from the Apple Hardware Test. Else I could only boot in Open Firmware and Single User Mode.

When I tried to startup on the install CD/DVD of 10.2.7, panther, tiger it froze too. However, after the lithium battery change I could install a 10.2.7 on the remaining drive (freeze in the middle but the system seems 100% on the drive).

The drives were OK, as the RAM (checked with memtest, while in SUM it can test 97% of you RAM including lower part not available another way), I counsel Applejack too which enables you to check drives, permissions, clean caches, check preferences while in SUM.

When I tried the AHT i went into something I found out is a commun bug instead of launching AHT i ended up in OF with this:

CODE

Invalid memory access at %SRR0: 000000000.6000d300 %SRR1: 100000000.40003030

Pretty impressive… but not meaning a lot.

As I knew my RAM was ok (even bought 1 GB more to check), the drives too, I tried in turn without the DVD burner, each SATA drives. I had no graphic card to try but overall it looks bad, only the hot pot, the temp sensors, the motherboard and the CPU are left, and no Applecare I have either (sorry Mr Apple, too expensive and never a mac has left me this way, NEVER). It's at the repairshop here in Paris since yesterday, and I ressucitated ye olde timer BW G3 last evening.

I'll buy tomorrow a FW external enclosure for the SATA drive on which I had saved my keychains/mail/etc as here I have no mail (it's my old mail database but I'm under tiger for a few months now and the databases are not compatible).

So in the end, it looks like it's something on the motherboard wich is blown in some way, so it'll $$$ in the end I know chips/components do die, but it's heartbrake, this was a fabulous computer. I'll know for sure in ten days.

Really, I need a macbook… (and no money for it s…t!)

[lepetitmartien]

The G3 is tigerized now! It's working great even if I had to replace the internel CD with a DVD burner. The updates did not work well the first time, the computer would not shut down correctly (closing wheel on blue screen never ending). A total re-update with a thorough cleaning of permissions, caches, desktop, plist etc did the trick. Thanks to AppleJack and ToolsX, I'm not sure the 1.7.0 version of OnyX is ok… I'll abstain till there's 1.7.1

It's definitely snappier than panther! Even if you can't do much more than writing/mail/browsing.

I've had a lot of issues to recover my user settings on the G5 a teamer lent me time on on monday. But now it's okay, I've still to verify the Mail is working But one thing to know. When recovering parts of a user account, be sure to be on a mac with the same user config as the ones you're recovering, I wasn't and it's been a nightmare due to permissions problems.

Apple should really make a tool for this, where you only check for the essential files you need absolutely. And not cloning the whole junk.