Hi there, I have recently bought an iMac G4 (iLamp) off craigslist-it's the original 17" model (800 MHz, SDRAM, 80 GB). When I bought it the girl told me, "I think it needs a Software Update." Well, turns out it needed a lot more than that. I plugged it in, hooked up a Pro keyboard and mouse, and waited for it to boot. About 45 seconds into the startup, I got a good old kernel panic. Starting up off my Tiger DVD resulted in endless spinning of the wheel, with DVD drive activity slowing up after a while. So I tried starting up OS X on the hard disk in verbose mode, and it panicked after a handful of IO errors. So I stuck a old 60 GB hard drive in and installed OS X 10.4 and now it works fine.
But I was wondering why the old drive "failed". It wouldn't even start up off the OS X DVD to do a disk check! I took the original "failed" hard drive and stuck it in my Linux box, and ran Disk Utility (the Gnome app, it's similar to Apple's). Disk checking on "Macintosh HD" turned up clean, but the S.M.A.R.T. Status field said, "Drive has a few bad sectors." On scanning THAT, it told me the drive is about to fail. But I can use all of the files on Linux fine, such as the System folder, Users and such. I don't know if the S.M.A.R.T field will cause OS X to crash or what. Also the screen has a number of small scratches in the upper left corner. When a light color is displayed underneath them, the screen looks dirty. But the pixels themselves are bright and all work. So I was wondering, is it possible to buy a screen "top mat" or whatever you call it to replace the scratched one? Thanks alot, Dan Ziegler P.S. The iMac I had been having trouble with has mysteriously fixed itself (for now). Thanks for your insight! -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to g3-5-list@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
