Good Saturday morning. Big weekend plans - get another 50 pages of this Photoshop book under my belt & do some cataloging of The World’s Largest T-Shirt Collection™️ & get the new-to-me PSU in the G5, a somewhat modern computer that ISN’T affected by the Intel bug. 🤨 Still pissed that IBM blew off the PPC 970 series of chips. I know they ran too hot but so much potential wasted.
@Devils_Rancher So after an hour-Long surgery to replace the PSU & lug the thing inside, that’s not what’s wrong with my old beast & I’m sad. (It took an hour bc I had the old & new PSU’s sitting next to each other & I re-installed the old one, only discovering my mistake as I was re-seating the last PCI card.)
So I tore it back down & re-installed the correct power supply & put it back together in less than 15 minutes. I’m now a pro at servicing a 15-year old Mac. If only I had diagnostic tools to tell me what the damn red knight in the motherboard meant... could be the board itself or one of the CPU’s. Do I take a 2002 G5 to the doctor for diagnostics?
@Devils_Rancher sounds like one of mine. I'm hoping to come across some combination of components that don't fail to run more than once before I have to resort to really troubleshooting the problems.
@djsundog It has a couple plugins that were never ported to Intel on it, so I have 1 album I mixed on it that can’t be remixed without figuring out how to replace those. Also, it ran my slide scanner great, but I currently have a last-gen PowerBook doing that. It needs to live forever, because we still have 1000 slides to scan & I keep shooting more.
@djsundog tomorrow I might pull one CPU unit then the other, because I understand those will run with 1 CPU, & that would eliminate 1 possible cause, but I don’t want to fork over $100.00 for a used CPU on eBay when that’s what the whole box is worth... but I can’t part it out on eBay without knowing what parts are good, either. Argh.
This damn G5 cost me 2 grand & it ran for 14 years. It was still working when I upgraded to a Mac Pro in 2012, & I powered it up occasionally & ran it through screen sharing until this summer, when I was literally about to give it to a friend. It stopped powering on the day I was going to pack it up.
@Devils_Rancher Meanwhile, 2017 me wants to teleport back to 2002 & apply for a job as an Apple service tech, because I can now pop open a G5 like a sardine tin. #UselessKnowledge
@Devils_Rancher Which light is it? You should be able to look it up in the corresponding service manual. http://www.tim.id.au/blog/tims-laptop-service-manuals/#toc-apple
@bezt I need to figure that out- it’s right at the edge of the mobo next to the power button - it says something there, but I need a magnifying glass to read it. Other people who have looked it up with similar symptoms just got “See service technician” so I’m not too hopeful I can solve it. Not gonna give up yet, but I took today “off.”
@Devils_Rancher So not one of the regular diagnostic LEDs, then? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT2652 (Which G5 is it?)
@bezt It’s The first Model, 2002 dual 2.0. The first red LED on that page just says “Contact Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider” & I don’t know where to dig deeper for whatever proprietary Apple info about those might be out there. I’m thinking it’s either a CPU of the motherboard. It’s not the air deflector. During one f it’s 5 min uptimes yesterday, I pulled the deflector & the fans went nuts, put it back & they slowed down.
@Devils_Rancher I think the full set of diagnostic lights only came in with the 2005 model (see p140 of https://www.scribd.com/doc/21536787/Apple-Power-Mac-G5-Quad-2-5-Dual-2-0-2-3-Ghz-Service-Repair-Manual)- I don't see a mention of the light in the 2003 Service Source notes (http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/old/Powermac/powermac_g5.pdf), but it does have full troubleshooting steps. Good luck!
@bezt Yeah, The troubleshooting steps are replace air deflector sensor, replace cpu(s) replace psu & replace motherboard. It’s not the air deflector bc the fans aren’t throttling up & I just replaced the PSU, so. I dunno. Gotta see how work goes the next few weeks & I might drag it to the local repair shop up the road.
One out of 10 or so pushes of the on button will boot it, but it shuts down suddenly after a few minutes. Can’t keep it on long enough to run the Apple Hardware Test disc on it (which I still have, BTW!)