Hi, I am having problems with my Power Mac G5. It doesn’t seem to start up. I have done a bit of looking on the net, and I am starting to think its something to do with the actual power unit. But I would be very grateful if some one could perhaps confirm my suspicions. I will detail my problem below. Ok, I turn my Mac on as normal yesterday morning, shut it own and went for the afternoon, when I return I turned it back on. However it did not start up normally. It got the white screen with apple logo and the circle icon just kept going round. This has happened to me before, and when it does so I just hold the power button and restart the Mac, and it starts up as normally. So that was what I did. However nothing happened the screen stayed black and there seemed to be no activity. The fans hummed as they do usually on start-up but soon went quite, and there seems to be no hard drive activity at all. I later realise that the power button LED lights up when pressed in, but then goes out. I have tried resetting the PRAM, and pressed the PMU button on the logic board, and still no luck. The cd drive will not eject so I can’t try booting from disk, and I have run out of ideas. Does anyone have any experience with a similar problem, or any ideas of what I can do to fix or try and work out what is wrong with it? Nothing like this has happened before, I have experience a slight problem before. Sometimes the Mac would load with the wrong resolution, but this would fix itself with a restart. I can’t think of anything else that may help for now. Any questions or further information about my system, please ask away. My suspition is that it’s something to do with either the logic board or the power unit. So I suspect a visit to my nearest apple store is in order. I have borrowed a friends spare Mac and I am going to put my hard drive in that so I can carry on with my work, will my hard drive need to be present if I take it in to a apple store to be fixed? Does anyone know? thanx for any help. regards mark

Mark, Try booting while holding down the SHIFT key - this is a safeboot which can sometimes fix minor issues..sorta like the "extensions off" feature in OS9. It will allow the MAC to boot with a minimum of resources enabled so if it boots then you have a hardware issue or corrupted set of preferences. A whole new topic. IF your CD drive is not a slot drive (Im guessing it isn't) you can strighten out a heavy paperclip and insert it into the little hole they provide to manually eject it. Be careful inserting it as you can damage your cd surface (that's if you do it at an angle . Push the paper clip stright it with firm force and the cd should open enough for you to slide it open and remove the disk. Assuming this all went well - insert your original disk for osx (intallation 1 disk) , clsoe the tray and turn the machine on holding down the OPTION key for at least a minute...you should see the drives you can boot from. CLick on the cdrom/osx disk drive button and boot to it. It will ask you if you wish to install the OS again but ignore that and go to the top menu provided and find DISK UTILITY. If you can repair your disk, it will allow you to select it and then run repair disk permissions and then verify disk.If these fail , you have a serious problem with data and/or recovery. If you cannot perform this software repair of the internal drive Id recommend that you buy a new hard drive, install it fresh out of the box (assuming its on cable select) by unplugging the system inserting the new drive and reconnect the power supply (plug it in) and then repeat the CD boot process and intall the new OS to the new drive after formatting it for apple which PARTITION disk in disk utility (and you guys thought OSX was easy to fix - lol) When you install your new OS you should be able to access your files again from your old hard drive on the desktop at least to save your stuff and then you can go online and update your machine again etc... But this is all dependant on 1) not a slot drive 2) your CDROM works 3) you have your disks and installing a drive isnt going to scare you. 4) your current drive isnt destroyed and finally - your system isnt totally trashed.If you cannot boot to a CDROM/DVD install disk you are sunk unless you have a bud who can load your disk and examine it on his machine. ((I didnt include 'his/her' there intentionally ...I'm never politically correct I'd rather stick to the truth. )) PS- if your system cannot "see" the CDROM disk once you change it out , try to force a boot to CD by pressing the "C" key while booting...it forces a boot to the CD if it can. Let me know what happens. PPS - dont open the case or swap things unless the power is off and unplugged !!!! and stay away from the little button on the mother board - you can fry the thing by pressing that little guy too many times..its like a detonator when pressed too may times. Go to support.apple.com to see how to use it properly! familiar with MAC OS 9 - 10.4 Win98-2k-XP etc, MCSE trainer + former instructor, & good guy ;