After doing what Jerry suggests, and there is still a problem try the following. Disconnect everything from the back of the computer, except the power, video and keyboard/mouse. Test the system. If it fails go to step 2
If you are comfortable opening the machine, take out all but one chip of ram, and try to start the Apple hardware test. If it fails, swap it with another chip and test again. Make sure you hold the chips by their edges. If it fails as it has each time previous, your ram is probably good. If you get errors on only one chip of ram, take it out re-install all of the ram and hook everything back up and test again. If it works then replace the bad chip. By your description it sounds like the drive may be bad, but lets rule out some easy stuff first. Brian O' On Apr 4, 2006, at 8:45 AM, Jerry Ethington wrote: On Apr 3, 2006, at 5:31 PM, Beth Phillips wrote: > After last night?s storms I?m having problems with one of our G5s. > When we finally had powered restored today, the user tried to turn > on their machine and received the kernel panic error. When they > tried to restart they received another message, but not sure what > that was. I could get the computer to boot into safe mode but when > I tried to run some commands from terminal I would get the kernel > panic. > > I decided to do an archive and install of the OS, but received the > kernel panic shortly after the actual install began. I?ve tried > booting with the option key and the original install CD so I could > run Apple?s Hardware Test, but I never get the arrow to allow me to > choose which drive I want to boot from, just a spinning stop watch. > > I booted into safe mode again and set my external fire wire drive > (Has a bootable Mac OS installed) as the startup disk which worked > fine, except that I still can?t run the Apple Hardware test from > there. I was going to change back to the Mac hard drive for my > startup disk and try to backup what data I could and try a complete > reinstall. But now the Mac Hard drive is not showing up as an > option in the startup disk control panel. I shut everything down > and tried rebooting again with the external drive disconnected and > now I?m getting a flashing square with a globe in it. Has anyone > seen this before and what does it mean? > > -- > Thanks, > Beth Ewwwww, someone else had problems after the storms too.....<grin> I found out the hard way my UPS had died. My best bet would be that the SMU chip on the G5, which manages power and a whole lot of other low level stuff, got scrambled. (Or PMU chip on earlier G5s - they changed over to the SMU chip in more recent G5s). You'll have to figure out the exact model G5 in question and look it up in Apple's online knowledgebase to see how to reset it - the instructions vary a bit depending on the specific model. It might also be worth a try to perform a NVRAM and hardware reset via Open Firmware. Power up the G5 and IMMEDIATELY hold down command, option, O, and F keys to enter Open Firmware. When you get the open firmware prompt, release the keys and type reset-nvram set-defaults reset-all The system will now reboot and hopefully be happier...... this will reset the NVRAM, PMU chip (if there is one), and some of the very low level hardware - it frequently helps weirdnesses like you are seeing. Hope this info help..... Jerry Jerry W. Ethington 245 Hawkeegan Drive Frankfort, KY 40601-3912 (502)682-2607 cellular jethington at mac.com "Quando omni, flunkus moritati." (When all else fails, play dead.) -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.math.louisville.edu/pipermail/macgroup/attachments/20060404/c069d134/attachment.html
