B&W G3 won't boot up...help!

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B&W G3 won't boot up...help!

Purchased a used Blue and White Yosemite power mac g3 400mhz with 12g HD. Has OS X jaguar installed. Worked fine the first few days but now is not bootign up. It turns on and there is power but nothing else happens. The monitor just has its defaul screen. Every 10th try or so it will boot up like normal. When it does boot up normally the screen displays a file and question mark a few time until OS loads. Does this mean anything? My powerbook did this when my HD went so I am a little concerned.

The Czar's picture
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Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
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It does sound like a flaky dr

It does sound like a flaky drive. The first thing I would suggest is making sure all cables are firmly attached (both at the drive and motherboard). If that doesn't fix the problem, I would try another cable, just to rule out that possibility. As well, I would try booting off of a Mac OS CD and seeing if the drive is recognized and mounted. It's possible that the drive is failing, but the aforementioned fixes have fixed about 25-35% of the problems when it looks like the drive is failing, and they are much cheaper than replacing the drive!

If you can get the machine up, however, I would back up all pertinent data from the drive before you start tinkering with everything. It just raises the comfort level a little bit to know that at least your data is safe.

Cheers,

The Czar

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PRAM battery?

How's the PRAM battery? And is the master-slave jumpers configuration on the CD drive and harddrive correct? Are you using the onboard ATA connection to the harddrive, or is there a third-party SCSI controller card or ATA card?

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After doing a little research

After doing a little research the sypmtons pointed to the PRAM battery. I replaced it and all seems fine. Ran utility and seemed like things were messy and I appear to be up and running.

Although I am still getting that blinking folder and question mark before the gray apple screen comes on. Is this because OS X was installed? and it needs to find it or something.I don't know what the master slave thing is or how to check it.... as far as I know the onboard ATA conection, but aguan, how would I know?

Also what is the P4 plug inside the tower connected to/ for? It is not attached or rather plugged in to anything and I was wondering what it is for. It is coming from the speaker box on the inside front panel. Thanks for your reply!

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The blinking question mark is

The blinking question mark is nothing to be concerned about as long as your Mac does boot within a few seconds. Basically your machine is searching for a system folder, and if your drive is particularily large, or full, it can take a while on some systems. My beige does the same thing with a 10GB ATA drive attached.

As for your other questions, I really don't have an answer, but I'm sure another soul on these fora who are more knowledgable than I will be able to answer your questions.

Cheers,

The Czar

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Thank You Czar - I appreci

Thank You Czar -

I appreciate both your replies. You put me at eases about the blinky thing.

Cheers,

Briggsy

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plugs galore

There's a bunch of plugs inside the case for extra harddrives, a zip drive, or whatever else, like extra fans. All Mac owners should have a copy of Diskwarrior or Drive 10. I've found rebuilding the volume structure alleviates many problems such as the blinking file. A good optimization on a regular basis helps too.

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Last seen: 17 years 4 months ago
Joined: Mar 11 2004 - 19:01
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Booting problems

You can look inside your mac and most likely find a diagram on the HD as to master/slave settings. If there is no diagram, you can go to the drive Manufacturer's site and get the pin-outs for your drive. From what I've experienced, my Mac sometimes "forgets" the start up OS location, and once I reselect it in the Start up Drive panel, it works fine with no "blinking " search for a valid OS...

Cheers.

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