What you see above is the carelessly displayed guts of a trusty friend. They are not supposed to be on my desk. I know, it ain't pretty. Hang with me while I relate the sad tale of how this came to be.
After many years of good service, great laughs, and bits processed, my Power Mac G5, aka Tank, seems to have died.
I came into the office this morning and was greeted with the dreaded Wind Tunnel™ noise. My monitors were dark and Tank was whirring for all he was worth. (not too much now)
I wasn't too worried, any developer has lived through a KP or two. I shut it down, let it rest for a bit and turned it back on. I got the chime, that was a good sign. But then nothing. Black screens, no hard drive noise, nothing. After sitting for a bit, the fans started to kick in again. I then got worried, this can't be good. I can't get it to respond to any stimulus. The trusty PRAM zap doesn't work, booting from CD, single-user, safe mode, even open firmware. Nope, nada.
Thinking it might be a bad power supply, I started ripping into it to take it to a local mac service shop. (hence the above picture) I don't know if the guy there knows what he's talking about or not, but he doubts it is the power supply. I have swapped RAM, hit the PMU reset, and kicked it. (gently) All for naught.
And because my macs never die I didn't bother buying Apple Care, which turns out being a good move. This machine shipped on Oct 10, 2003. So my 3 years would have been up already.
Who is in the market for a dead G5!?! ;) Or rather, who can tell me how to fix this poor thing! I loved it like a son! .... or at least like a dog... definitely didn't hate it like a cat. Anyone have any experience similar to this? Ideas on how to save it from certain eBay death?
UPDATE: Thanks to dogbert and Slava for the video card suggestions. I pulled it out, and it seems to boot now. It still seems to be having some issues because the fans kick into high gear fairly quickly. Either way, when you are in the market for a new video card on the mac, you start to see why switchers have at least a few things to complain about...
UPDATE 2: Well, it's not the video card. I popped an identical working card in and it still won't work.
UPDATE 3: Okay, so here's the latest from my tinkering... It DOES function to a degree. If I wait about 1 minute after the initial startup chime, it will recognize keyboard input. So if, for example, I hold down Apple-Option-P-R, after about a minute, it will finally restart. Fascinatingly enough, even Firewire Target Disk mode works after this delay. But booting never seems to work using a CD or otherwise. It just spins the fans up to max and eventually I tire of waiting for something to happen. Also, no matter what mode I'm testing, i NEVER get any video on screen. But again, swapping the video card out didn't cause anything to change at all.
Posted by brian at 03:53 PM
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If you're actually getting power I doubt it's a power supply issue, sounds more like something with the logic board. Try here:
http://www.dttservice.com/appledesktops/powermacg5.html#pmg5%20logic
Posted by: Martin Pilkington on November 29, 2006 4:14 PM:( It is always sad when I read stories like this. I don't know what to tell you but I wish you the best of luck.
Posted by: Paul Malenke on November 29, 2006 4:35 PMIf it still works, it's probably worth at least half of its original price. Check EveryMac.com.
Posted by: Ben Rosenthal on November 29, 2006 5:31 PMPerhaps a nuked video card or the like? While i'm not a HW engineer I would seriously doubt the issue is the PS or MLB. If you hear the boot chime then the ROM, RAM, and CPU is obviously working and executing code, however, there could be a bad video card or other PCI device ether nuked or not seated properly that would cause a KP very early in boot. I would tinker with it a bit before declaring it dead.
Posted by: dogbert on November 29, 2006 5:46 PMI thought about the video card, but it doesn't seem to be that because it never gets anywhere. There is no activity beyond the startup chime. I would assume that if it were video, it would still boot and I could SSH in...
Posted by: Brian on November 29, 2006 6:43 PMI should note also, since someone emailed me asking, I tested the battery and it's fine. Pumping out 3.6V as it should.
Posted by: Brian on November 29, 2006 6:45 PMWhile I have absolutely nothing useful to contribute to figuring out why your machine isn't working, I did want to point out that I also have a tower named The Tank. :)
Posted by: Steve Streza on November 29, 2006 10:59 PMATI X1900 G5 edition seems like a good card for you. It has PCI Express (not X) yes?
It has some real interesting 2d acceleration features.
Posted by: Ilgaz on November 30, 2006 4:48 PMLet the diagnostic cd run.. it might well note something with the thermal diode or such..
g5 often kill their motherboard, or if not, the CPU daughter card gets tired of working correctly...
On the mainboard, you have 7 LEDs which might give a state or so...
Posted by: Mike Sprecher on December 1, 2006 12:53 AMHi, sorry to hear about your computer. I'm currently an Apple Certified Technician. I can say with about 90% certainty based on what you've described that it's the video card or logic board. If it weren't making a tone, it'd be more likely that it was a processor. Also double check that both processors are seated properly, since they've been removed. If you plan on pursuing this, contact me and I'll send you the service manual.
Posted by: Zach Lutz on December 1, 2006 12:38 PMMike - I can't get video and can't boot into anything other than Target Disk Mode. Also, I have the Rev A edition that doesn't have the LEDs.
Zach - I appreciate the help. I'm starting to think it's logic board. But I really don't know... check out Update 3 in this post. It's odd.
Posted by: Brian on December 2, 2006 9:55 AMYou're doing something funky with your RSS -- this is probably the fifth time NetNewswire has shown me this post in the last couple of days.
Are you doing updates to the post or something? If this post keeps appearing over the weekend I'm going to have to drop this site....
Posted by: Bob on December 2, 2006 5:54 PMYou've probably lost one of the processors. If you made a note of which processor was in which slot, put the bottom one back in and try powering up. If it still fails swap out the bottom one and slide the top one in and try it. If neither of them result in a working machine, then as you suspect it may indeed be the logic board itself.
Posted by: HowardG on December 13, 2006 12:22 AMKeep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated.