On Nov 5, 2005, at 9:11 AM, Brian Hunt wrote:
I recently purchased a used G4 cube from ebay that must have a
hardware problem.. the cube boots to a blue screen with a file icon
in the center that alternates between a smiling OS icon and a
question mark. At first i thought that it was asking for software
but quickly realized that i should see a disk icon with a flashing
question mark, not the file icon with alternating symbols...
The Cube won't boot to anything else. I tried inserting a system
install disk and it took it inside but would not boot to the cd,
holding down the C key at restart or startup would do nothing.
Also i could not get the drive to eject the disk. I tried several
combinations of holding down the mouse button at startup or restart
but the Cube still would not eject it.
You have two problems: The Mac cannot find a bootable System folder,
and you likely have a dead Optical drive. The file icon w/question
mark is shown when the mac can find a valid disk, but not a valid
System folder. The disk icon w/question mark is when it cannot even
find a disk.
The Cube does have FW, and will boot from it, so I'd look around for
an external FW Optical drive of some sort to test booting from it.
Alternatively, if you've got a Mac with a FW port, you can boot the
Cube in FW Target mode (by holding down the T key), connect it to a
working Mac and diagnose the problem from there.
If it's got OS 9 on it, it could be as simple as re-blessing the
System folder by dragging the System suitcase out of the System
folder, closing the System folder and dragging it back onto the
System folder.
If it's running OS X, you can CCC your existing OS X to it.
Or the drive may be erased, in which case you need to install an OS
on it, also doable with it in FW TDM.
--
Bruce Johnson
This is the sig who says 'Ni!'
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