I'm experiencing a frustrating problem with my G4 Sawtooth system...
When I perform a warm reset (ie - selecting restart from the menu or hitting the front panel button), I get a flashing question mark when the system comes back up. On most resets my drives will spin down but won't spin back up when the system restarts. Whether they do or not, still no system folder found.
If I power-off the system, the drives spin up and behave normally.
I had previously been experiencing some disk problems in OS 9, and once or twice had the reset problem, but it's recently escalated to every restart.
I've tried the usual suspects, attempting to eliminate as much as possible:
- switching power supplies
- using different hard drives
- resetting PRAM and cuda
- resetting to defaults in OF
- switching cables so the drive(s) are on the other IDE bus
- switching ide cables
- removing the logic board from the case
The drives work just fine in my B&W: same combination, master/slave settings and same cable.
I've air-cleaned the logic board and processor. It's looking more and more like the logic board's IDE controller is the problem, but since I've had strange quirks in my other G3/G4 machines, thought perhaps someone else has been through this.
I think you might be right. It sure would not hurt to invest in a ATA card for your drives. I had two G4s that would not even power up due to a bad controller chip but worked ok on the controller for the CD-Rom drive and I wound up using that setup with my hard drives.
I looked at a few of the ATA cards at Other World, as well as ebay, and for the price of them I could get new logic board.
I've moved the drives back to the G3, and am posting from it. I did realize there's another oddity with the G4 that's fairly recent: when booting in any OS, the monitor will register sync quickly, then drop out, and repeat this again before I get a grey screen. It didn't do this before.
If this is related, then the problem may be broader than the ata bus.
I've got a Quicksilver CPU on the way, that I'd bought before all this mess, so I'll be able to eliminate one more component.
The new processor arrived, which required temporary removal of the secondary IDE port.
No go. Hard drives still spin down on reset, and don't come back. I'm also getting - with both processors - occasional cache and memory errors.
If it were just IDE problems, then I'd consider grabbing an ATA card from OWC, but it's looking like it'd be a better option to look for another board...or another whole system.
If anyone's got a spare Sawtooth around...drop me a PM.