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.
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?
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!)
@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.
@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.)