attack of the phantom reboot

This sounds like a few things all in one. It sortof sounds like the pram is going dead cause you have to alway's reset the monitor in a way but not cause you can get it to boot "it might be going dead ". it could be your PSU going bad hince the shrinking of the screen when in the desktop. OS 9.2.2 i dont think will tell you when the pram battery is going it just starts to act weird BTW how long have you had the pram batterey. Have you held the cuda for 30 seconds with the Mac unplugged. I had the reboot problem somthing like it when i tryed to install OS X 10.2.8 it would boot the install cd fine and finish fine but on reboot it would show a white screen with the word's can't open about 50 times then show the happy mac and reboot and would repeat this over and over till i hit the rocker power switch off in the back. what solved my problem was trying diffrent jummper settings on the hdd but this is not the problem you have. it sounds like either your PSU is on its way out or the pram is not strong enuff to keep the setting's in pram and nvram. i do hope you get your's fixed

and sorry for the ugly reply

see i think the pram also. but the battery isn't that old. and when, in the past, the battery was going bye bye, os 9 would always reset the clock. thats not happening. plus the veiwing area shrinking has only happened in osx. os9 has never had this issue. as far as the psu, this was a unit from a school and wasnt used for very long and then i got it. i hope it isnt the psu, because i have done that before and it was not fun at all. but the monitor issue of always having to set the brightness goe like this:

1. turn on machine and wait for boot. (the built in mon is just very dim and low contrast)
2. once desktop loads, open system prefs and select display
3. go to colour, then click calibrate, click next
4. the funky part is, the dials are already set to the highest, but if you just single click each dot, the bright ness changes, and the contrast changes
5. click back, close that window
6. click on my mon profile and then all is fine. i have had this problem in puma, jaguar, and panther. and also in two different g3aio's. i thought this was just the osx gossamar problem that all had to face. could xpostfacto fix that atleast. because i have selected the old nvdr and rage pro patch. i read that someone did that and so i did also.

the white screen with the cant boot, i had that with both panther and jaguar at first. but reseting the pram fixed that for me.

but i am serious about the illustration to whoever has the final resolution. granted it might take a while till i can determine what fixed it and who gave the info. but i will keep a list.

peace and love
ande

rummelx2.com

i dunno then, Jag alway's run's fine for me i have the same rom and logic board as you and i also have the 4mb upgrade vram chip installed onboard and i just installed a 256mb ram chip in i got yesterday it makes my total 448mb ram and everything runs' faster. do you think it could be a ram problem have you tryed removing all but one and see if it does it and try all of them by them self. could it be a bad connection on the personality card or the vram upgrade for the onboard video the only time i had a internal monitor blackout was with tiger and xpsotfacto4 and when it happened and i moved the mouse the system froze. and to top it off no cd's or dvd's would mount. They would only mount if i rebooted into tiger with a cd or dvd in the drive but it would only work for 10-20 minutes i got madd and took tiger off my hdd. i didnt try xpostfacto4b i think its called the beta version i hers it some times works better than the final on our system's. and some had better luck with xpostfacto4 i know i didnt

You definitely have some sort of hardware incompatibility. Does it do the reboot loop if you unplug all your peripherals? With everything unplugged can you start in safe mode (shift key held down0? Can you run in single user mode and repair the drive? (command - S until you see a prompt, then type fsck -yf to repair your drive, type reboot to restart your mac. Have you explored resetting the parameter ram and the open firmware options? (lots of helpful info here: http://tinyurl.com/894mg)

hope this helps.

my wife confirmed. that the reboot loop still happens eventhough all is unplugged but the external mon and the apple keyboard II . as soon as i get home i will try alll these things. i have not tried OF yet.

how would i go about uninstalling the virttual pc. since this all started when i tried to load win2k.

peace and love
ande

a long time ago, I had a G3 upgrade in my 8600, I had a problem with the settings in XPF, I forget what exactly was doing it, but resetting OF and changing settings in XPF worked for me.

It has anything to do with VPC. In fact I'd bet money on it.
Instead, dig into the console, you'll find it in the utilities folder inside the applications folder. Look at your crash and kernel panic logs, note the times of the crashes, see if that sheds light on when and why the mac is crashing/rebooting. Try disconnecting all your hardware. The biggest problem with OS X is kernel panics that happen when you attach hardware that has bad/missing drivers.

yea revrse what settings you changed in xpostfacto before the problems started. go into open firmware command-option-o-f at start chime

type init-nvram (press enter/return)
type set-defaults (press enter/return)
type reset-all (press enter/return)

and i would also hold the cuda button for 30 seconds with the power plug unhooked

and after all that press and hold command-option-p-r till you hear 3 start sound's If all this dont work it would have to be a about dead pram battery it might be enuff power to keep time but might not be enuff to keep the right setting's on power up. all you have to do is run the vpc installer again and look in every window to see if there is a uninstall option in one of the drop down boxes. or find out what it installed and take it all out and throw it in the trash

#1 makes me think that it's not software or PRAM-related at all; it's awfully similar to a phantom problem I've had with a particular iMac. That machine would do similar things with the monitor image shrinking and flickering, and would reboot at random. The monitor goofiness would always precede the reboot. It finally got so bad that it no longer boots up at all.

The problem turned out to be a dying power supply. I haven't confirmed that, but I've checked with two Apple certified techs, and they both had the same diagnosis.

While I've never experienced an AIO, the similarity of what's happening with yours makes me wonder if it's the same problem.

I've seen this before. your motherboard is damaged to where it will lock in restart mode. I have encountered this on a pc and its exactly the same. The only thing i know of that you can do i either replace the board or live with it. this is easier to fix in pc's because of the open pc market but your oiptions are really cut short if you have i mac. ebay is your freind

It looks like you have made some modifications on this computer, ake sure that all the grounds are contacting correctly. The restart could have something to do with the fact that the ADB ground is shorting somewhere. Otherwise, it sounds like common computer behavior when a power supply is geting old. As a PS gets older, its voltages start sagging, and eventually the computer won't put up with it anymore, and will shut down. When you restart, the PS will have recooperated a little bit, and the computer will run untill the PS woltage drops too far again.

1. found that the power connector and splitter for the hd fan was not connecting properly
2. xpf'd new extensions
3. finally got to zap the pram.
4. finally got into OF and reset all
5. the monitor stopped crackling.
6. got powerlogix cpu director to finally enable the l2 cache
7. viewing area still shrinks, and reboots after it blanks out randomly.(trying to tyope this quickly before it does it again)
8. will add another post

1. replaced prAm battery and voltage regulator plus i removed 2nd HD.
2. still wont boot straight into osx. only os9
3. to boot into x i have to hold the command key
4. xpf will get me there but restart takes you back to 9
5. with xpf i disabled the rage pro patch, still problems.
6. this still only happens in osx, os9 is perfect. i dont have to reset the monitor every time i boot into 9, just x. 9 doesnt have the mon flicker or reboot randomly.

it getting somewhere but why would this happen now and not the others times i loaded x or went i freshly loaded this system i am using?

peace and love
ande

I'm probably going to arouse some anger here, but I find the Gossamer boards to be really, um finicky, even with everything "right" by the standards.

This isn't just based on one board I had; when I built my Beige (which is now my Blue and White, moved the upgrades into it) I got several boards, different ROMs, all that good stuff. Open Firmware often got glitchy for no good reason on any and all of them, and I'd have to reset it now and again. If I wanted to run 9 for a few hours and then go back into X? A total headache, even with XPostFacto to aid me (NOT dogging on XPostFacto at all, mad love and props and all of that stuff to it.)

Picked up a late-rev Blue and White, put all the stuff in, flawless. It runs for weeks at a time acting as a fileserver for our home network, runs vnc, ssh and RDP sessions into all my other boxes 24/7, half of which dont even have monitors on them anymore...crunches WUs when I'm not actively using it... it's a real Tank.

But I'd have to guess power supply from what I've read or intermittent grounding, etc too, minus the dealio with the screen, which leads me to suspect more CRT-centric issues (flyback etc.) If it were me, I'd be doing a complete and total teardown of the thing minus the CRT, pulling EVERYTHING else, cleaning all of the edged contacts, et cetera.

Surely the MolarMacs have the same jumper to switch from a Mac to a PC power supply, right? Perhaps trying it with a ATX powersupply hanging out of it would be in order.

Standard Disclaimer: I know the CRT is flaking out, but for the love of God man, stay as far away from it as you can, especially anything that looks like a suction cup or a gigantic transformer. A slip of a screwdriver in there could quite literally be lethal; if youre turning screws at all inside of it, one hand in your back pocket with the most insulated screwdriver you can find. If what I said to you is at all unclear, Google for what being discharged into you.

Not trying to freak you out, just keep you safe.

right before i posted the previous two, my comp rebooted, but back into x, but just befor e iwas about to post the ten page novellette of extreme details of the night and morning. so i just gave you the gist and split the post incase the comp rebooted. but since that last reboot, this has been the longest it has gone without a reboot. if i didnt have a bunch of adobe product for osx hen i would go back to 9. this has been the worst experience yet. i have never had any problem with 9. i have had more crashes with x. and i have worked with 61/7100's 5500's 7600's g3aio's g4digaudio's g3imacs.

i wish there was a way to put an osx prefered mobo inside the g3aio body and just put a vga mon in and still be able to use the external monitor. i know i can do it with pc parts, but i cant do the whole 0sx86 or the other x onto pc things. has anyone else had this much x problems or am i just lucky.

peace and love
ande

ps, maybe put the laptop lcd in place of crt, and try to extend the vid cable to the ...
why go to so much. i should turn the aio into the 9 machine for all my old equipment and get a powerbook g4 12' and hook the 17"crt to that. $$$ is not there.

pps, we'll see what goes and if i need to replace the psu. i think it might just be a kernel panic or something

right after my last post, i decided to go into 9 to scan some images. i have to go into 9 because of my apple onescanner. i am in the middle of scanning and boom - reboot!

and so far x has not had a reboot. this is so much fun.

plus on a lighter note, my whole system is much better now that the l2cache is enabled.

but here is my plan, i will hun6t down an inexpensive 15"vga lcd and replace the crtand plug it into the built-in mon port with db-15 to vga adaptor. with all the new found space, i will, use an atx psu, and start a scsi raid. that sounds fun.

peace and love
ande

ps, i will talley the points and see who gets the 11x14.

(unless you did already and I just missed it)

replace the power cable (the AC power cord)
. also, check the integrity of the AC outlet

replace (or just unplug) the ADB cable and/or keyboard

dan k

so here is where i stand:

1. replaced rom, still happening
2. tried three different keyboards with three different adb cables, still there.
3. atx psu inserted through modem hole. this powers the drives and the mobo. guess what the reboot still happen and the monitor got the crackles again.

new ideas:

1. bad wings card.
2. bad sound board at front of machine (sound got all funky)
3. bad aio cable or monitor cable
4. bad psu
5. bad monitor???

next attempts:

1. replace wings with whisper card
2. pull mobo sled out and put into second aio body
3. do a little dance
4. make a little love
5. get down tonight
6. get down tonight

what i don't want to do:

1. buy another psu
2. buy another aio body (if i have to relace the psu, this would be the cheapest solution)
3. touch the internal crt and replace with another crt (i dont want to die)
4. loose the aio form factor and put it all into a tower

what i would love to do but dont have the money for:

1. gut out crt and replace with lcd
2. use bigger atx psu
3. use the space for more scsi drives
4. get a powerbook
5. get a mac mini

since i have to put the second aio body back together out opf storage, this might take a night or two. i will post as soon i have the results.

peace and love
ande

It could be the personality card Ive never had the problem with mine yet. the mobo could be going bad. the personality card handles sound and video so that is where the bad sound was comming from. the IDE looking camle hooked to the personality card carries sound and some video related signals and the other cable handles RGB and RGB ground for the color's on the monitor. the crackling sounds like the flyback mabe. mine whistles for a few minutes when i turn the Mac on or wake it up. Your problem mite get resolved with the other AIO body only time will tell. im thinkfull i was given 2 AIO's incase somthing happens to my main AIO. somthing is just not right with your Mac what i would do it take everything apart and buy a can of compressed air and blow everything out and wipe it down with a duster to break up the more hard to get dust and blow again and put it all back together. Lets all hope the new AIO boddy rules out the PSU theary and the monitor and cable and the front sound/volume/light board if it has those parts.

Good luck
RummelAIO

i am glad that i have bodies on hand. i was just hoping to keep the two in full mode to expand the studio. but i think i will try the lcd thing when i get the cash for the monitor.

i also think that the wings card is doing it. becuase when i had the external atx psu on and forgot to turn the rocker switch on in the back, as soon as i turned the monitor on, the thing rebooted after it had been booting for several seconds.

i have a whisper card. not as cool as the wings, but it will keep the powerhouse going. i could buy another down the road.

peace and love
ande

give me a couple days and i will let all those who have helped, who won the 11x14.

hey ebay has A/V wings personality cards they are cheap to

finally i think i have success.

1. i replaced the video board from the main machine with the one from the second body
2. replaced the entire crt with the second machine's

i guess it was the video board and not the power supply. i did a lot of moving bits around, and then i hit a setup that has had no problems yet.

peace and love
ande

im glad to hear you got your AIO back up and running. I hope i dont run into that problem cause i dont want to lose 1 of the 2 AIO's i have. but at least we know what to do if it does happen. does your Mic work on your AIO in OS X, how about the volume buttons on the front in OS X. and do the front 2 earpfones shut down the main speakers when you plug a head set in one

1. the volume button works
2. the mic has never worked in osx
3. the front headphone jacks dont turnoff the speakers when plugged in, the the rear jack does.
4. i havnt had a chance to try yet, but osx does recognize the auido in and out from the wings card.

btw, the wings card was not a problem, but i did replace the aio cable(the ide lookin one) as well as the rgb cable.

peace and love
ande

huh my volume button dont work in OS X but it does in OS 9.2.2

i know that it is lame to have to say this but, here goes:

1. the crackle is completely gone, for 6 days now.
2. no reboot out of nowhere, for six days now.
3. the monitor still starts out really dark, even after purchasing and installing a brand new pram battery.

so, now for the prize inside...i will send private message out to the winner.

peace and love
ande