09-09-2014, 01:49 AM
OK this is weird. I have an old G4 Mini that has been sitting on the shelf for awhile since I upgraded to my shiny new i5 Hackintosh. It worked fine the last time I tried to use it which I believe was in February...
I decided to finally get the remaining stuff off the HD and to my horror when I tried to boot the Mini I got the dreaded Flashing folder and question mark. Found it odd that my HD would just die sitting on the shelf, it didn't drop or anything. AND I do have a Time Machine backup so all is not lost, but still PITA....
So I boot from a Firewire drive with a leopard install partition and it does not even recognize that there is a drive there OR the DVD drive in disk utility OR system profiler. Now I am really stumped. I notice the date is wrong too but figure maybe the installer is just confused but PRAM immediately comes to mind. I used to have an bootable utilities partition on the same drive but somehow it got deleted. But Diskwarrior etc won't be much help if the computer doesn't even SEE the HD or Optical drives.
So I figure maybe the PRAM or PMU got messed up so I try to reset both and then out of nowhere the thing just boots like normal. The only thing wrong is that the date was reset to 1994 but that happens anyway when you zap the PRAM doesn't it?
I figure if it is the PRAM battery, I will find out when I turn it off and try to reboot, but I am afraid to do that for now until I get the Data I need. It has never been replaced so I figure it is has been on borrowed time for awhile. And it is not so simple to replace. I don't know where my putty knives are and I already took this thing apart once when I replaced the HD and it was not particularly entertaining...
Would a dead PRAM battery (or corrupted PRAM) cause the HD and Optical drives not to be recognized or even spin up? Or is this a sign of a more serious hardware failure? Just a weird fluke? I will try to dig up a hardware test CD for this machine. What say you all?
I decided to finally get the remaining stuff off the HD and to my horror when I tried to boot the Mini I got the dreaded Flashing folder and question mark. Found it odd that my HD would just die sitting on the shelf, it didn't drop or anything. AND I do have a Time Machine backup so all is not lost, but still PITA....
So I boot from a Firewire drive with a leopard install partition and it does not even recognize that there is a drive there OR the DVD drive in disk utility OR system profiler. Now I am really stumped. I notice the date is wrong too but figure maybe the installer is just confused but PRAM immediately comes to mind. I used to have an bootable utilities partition on the same drive but somehow it got deleted. But Diskwarrior etc won't be much help if the computer doesn't even SEE the HD or Optical drives.
So I figure maybe the PRAM or PMU got messed up so I try to reset both and then out of nowhere the thing just boots like normal. The only thing wrong is that the date was reset to 1994 but that happens anyway when you zap the PRAM doesn't it?
I figure if it is the PRAM battery, I will find out when I turn it off and try to reboot, but I am afraid to do that for now until I get the Data I need. It has never been replaced so I figure it is has been on borrowed time for awhile. And it is not so simple to replace. I don't know where my putty knives are and I already took this thing apart once when I replaced the HD and it was not particularly entertaining...
Would a dead PRAM battery (or corrupted PRAM) cause the HD and Optical drives not to be recognized or even spin up? Or is this a sign of a more serious hardware failure? Just a weird fluke? I will try to dig up a hardware test CD for this machine. What say you all?