My friend brought his 400Mhz iMac over to my house to see if I could fix it. I dont know whats wrong with it but when you turn it on the light lights up but the computer wont start up its just a black screen. I can hear the hard drive turn on but nothing after that....
Any suggestions?
is there an os? try booting from an os 9 cd.
or swap the drive with another computert to verify that there is nothing wrong with the operating suystem or the drive.
Is there a light coming on at all?
If theres something wrong with the drive wont there be a question mark folder on a grey screen? yes the light turns on =/
Then I think this is called the Green Light Of Death.
OH POOP! what do i need to buy to fix this little problem?
A new ..everything.
You can spend hours upon hours trying numerous ways of getting it to boot, but really it's a better idea to replace the machine, given their low current market value(unless you have a lot of spare time).
I seem to ask this all the time, but was it a botched OS X install that killed it? There's all sorts of posts here regarding the problem...
whats that mean? I dont think it has or had OSX ever on it. From what my friend told me it was sitting around at his Tech school and the teacher didnt like macs and couldnt figure out what was wrong with it so he gave it to him...I still have my 600MHz iMac I guess I could test parts in this older one..hmm...I dunno if i want to risk trashing my iMac though
The problem would come about when someone first tried to run an OS X install. If it was already wonky when the teacher had it, then this means it is probably handed down as a 4th generation I-can't-fix-it problem, minimum. It's very possible the teacher didn't know about the iMac OS X problem, or anyone who had tech access to the machine at the school, whoever. If it seems to be booting, let it. Then when it seems to be done, press thepower button to put it to sleep. Then wake it back up. You might get some sort of video that would be enough to do the simple firmware upgrade that will fix the problem. If it doesn't seem to boot from the HDD try to boot from an OS 9 install CD. You'll need to get to 9.1 to run the installer. If it doesn't boot, your back where you started, but with one less *VERY* common iMac problem scratched off of your troubleshooting list.
Ok I will try that when I get home!
Thanks!
Well I just took the dam computer apart and threw away the CDRW drive. I put a DVD/CD drive in it. Now the darn screen is really bright looking and a little fuzzy..all my bad luck with macs is getting me into wanting a PC. =/
I dont know how long this post will be here since for some reason my posts keep getting deleted.
You would have to read the post that got deleted to know what im talking about.
Have you done the firmware upgrade? Sometimes the video looks mostly fine but is still over driving the circuits. There might not be damage for a while if it is being over driven but over time it might get progresssively worse.