Right, officially stumped.....

whiterebel

A mate of mine was given an iMac g4 800MHz with 768MB RAm, 80Gb HD etc. Its the "Anglepoise neck" one. Wouldn't boot when he got it, so I took it home and tinkered with it a bit. Had to reset PRAM, run fsck, reset nvram and it looked ok.Got it to boot off a 10.3 disk, did a 7 pass erase and installed. Installed fine and restarted onto 10.3. Now, no matter what I do, it goes straight to "flashing question mark". When I run DFA off the disk it verifies SMART status ok.
I'm a good while out of Tech Support now, and this has me baffled. The one thing I haven't done is reseat the extra RAM, but other than that, anyone any ideas? Too nice a machine to bin it.

WUSBDesign

When the iMac is booted off correctly, try going into System Preferences and explicitly set the startup disk. Reboot.

If this does not work, then do the same but for a external FW HDD (if you have). The suspect is then an internal HDD failure.

Oh, what model is that internal HDD?

whiterebel

I had set the startup disk ok. I actually meant to put it on an external HD and forgot about it....D'oh!!!

Will look up the model of HD tonight when I get a chance. SMART status shouldn't have worked on that HD I don't think, I'm sure that only came in a few years ago on newer drives.

WUSBDesign

There are some 80GB Seagate HDD models which do cause grief - cannot get hold of the model number since I've since sold it off! What happened is that the iMac (exact same model) booted off fine, but when resuming from sleep, MacOS beach-balled indefinitely or crashed. All that was needed was a replacement with a new 250GB HDD.

savemejebus

I had a similar issue with an ibook. Turned out the logic board was fried.

Type 17

savemejebus wrote: »

I had a similar issue with an ibook. Turned out the logic board was fried.

That's a well-known issue with iBooks and, although the symptoms are similar, the chances of an iMac G4 having a dead logic board are no greater than any other Mac.

My money is still on a dodgy HD...

ZENER

I'd agree. Try installing to an external drive just to discount any doubts about the internals but the internal drive won't cost much to replace - about 60 quid for a new 120 BG model now.

ZEN

WUSBDesign

Unfortunately, replacing the internal HDD or optical drive of a "lamp-shade" iMac G4 can be a risky affair. Do attempt that external FW HDD booting process first before committing cash and plenty of time (and care!) to that opening up of that dome.

whiterebel

WUSBDesign wrote: »

Unfortunately, replacing the internal HDD or optical drive of a "lamp-shade" iMac G4 can be a risky affair. Do attempt that external FW HDD booting process first before committing cash and plenty of time (and care!) to that opening up of that dome.

Yes, I read around that its a bit tricky. If it boots off a FW drive I'll just recommend that he buys an external FW drive for it altogether.

ZENER

I guess it depends on ability but it seems doable if you're up for it.

ZEN