On Jan 25, 2010, at 12:14 PM, Dan wrote:
At 8:54 PM -0800 1/24/2010, Nat Hall wrote:
I have an iMac G5 (20" screen, 2.0GHZ) that is having some sort of
serious issue. This has been a family owned machine since it was
bought brand new in Jan 2006. It's on it's THIRD logic board and
THIRD power supply, and I fear may soon be on its fourth unless I
can fix it.
The problem started as hard disk data corrupting, and eventually a
total system freeze. After rebooting, the iMac would no longer see
the hard drive. I ran Apple Hardware Test (the extended test)
which found zero problems. I rebooted with the OS X installer disc
and ran Disk Utility, and the hard disk wasn't even listed (only
the DVD disc & drive).
Naturally, I figured my hard drive had finally given up the ghost.
So I bought a brand new 250GB SATA drive from a local Mac store.
Lo and behold, the brand new disk does not show up in Disk Utility
either. So..... It seems I have some sort of logic board problem,
although this is drastically different behavior than what happened
in the past when the logic board went down. Has anyone heard of
this, or is it likely just another variation of the G5 motherboard
syndrome?
Could be just that SATA interface has died.
Will the machine talk to an external drive connected by firewire or
USB?
If you can get into that old HD, the system logs might have some
error messages that can shed light on what happened...
- Dan.
Unfortunately, I don't have any external drives to test with...
I did some reading online last night after posting that message on
the G5 logic board problems and it said bulging capacitors is a dead
giveaway of the syndrome. Sure enough-- I have plenty that are
bulging, some have even burst out the top. I guess it's safe to
assume this is probably the cause of my problems. So.... three logic
boards down in less than 5 years. Is this a typical track record for
these machines? I may attempt to fix this one rather than seeking
another replacement though, I've done my share of soldering on old
compact Macs in past years...
Nat
--
You received this message because you are a member of the iMac Group, a group
for those using Apple iMacs and eMacs.
The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/imac/list.shtml and our netiquette
guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml
To post to this group, send email to imaclist@googlegroups.com
To leave this group, send email to imaclist+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/imaclist
