He might try removing all boards, processor especially, etc and plugging them back in in case it's just a bad connection on the CPU socket or something.
You're fast Reboot. Thanks for answering. We were discussing this very thing (new Mac) the other night. He just lost his iBook after 4 years and now his G4 tower?? Oh boy, he might just have to wait for the iPad he wanted so much.
He's going to try the fsck trick when he comes home. I'll relay your message to him and thanks for all your help.
You know, these old Sawtooths are so much a part of us that it really hurts to have to say goodbye.
If you want to put the hammer to the RAM and really heat them up try memtest.
memtest Not free but $1.39. I've had it find find bad RAM when Apple's hardware test couldn't. Run it in Single User mode first, that way it only uses about 50M to boot up and will test the majority of the RAM. Processor caches are disabled in SU mode. If you double click memtest while running from a regular boot it will run, and will then also test the processor caches, but less RAM, since it takes more RAM to boot regular.
A way to get it free is to download Rember, then go to Show Package Contents for Rember, Contents/Resources/ and copy the memtest file out of there onto the HD. You don't get the memtest User Guide with Rember, only with the memtest d/l version, guess it's worth the $1.39 for the guy that wrote it. Memtest is open source.
Copy the memtest file from the memtest ƒ folder to the top level of your HD. Reboot into SU mode, then type /memtest*all*6*-L * = space. /memtest invokes the app, all tells it to test all available RAM, 6 tells it 6 passes, -L puts a log on the top level of the HD.
If you want to end the test early hit Command-Period or Control-C.
On some machines, in SU mode, the fans run full speed since no software speed control loads.
It takes about an hour or so on a dual 867 to run one pass with 2G of RAM. You want to run a few passes to really heat up the RAM to increase chances of showing marginal RAM. I've had it not find bad modules on the first pass or two. Any error is not good. If the machine locks up it's not good. If it does error or lock up, remove as many chips as possible and test with the minimum amount of RAM that you can. If that test passes remove that module, and put in a different one. It doesn't have the ability to tell exactly which module is bad unfortunately.
If it shows no errors when in SU mode, but errors out when running it from the Finder that means a processor cache is bad.
Thanks Reboot for that very detailed post. I am going to save it for another time. My son after work was able to get DiskWarrior to work and found lots & lots of errors in red. He managed to get the G4 up and running...whew.
He's keeping his fingers crossed and hope it keeps running. I guess down the line a new Mini will be what he gets.
Thanks so much for the help Reboot. You're the greatest!!
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