g3 imac won't repond- please help!

[shaun jackson]

Hi, I hope someone out there can help me bring my 500ghz snow imac cdrw back to life.

The power button beeps very quietly and flashes once when pressed. Nothing else happens. No start-up. Nil response.

After a search of the forums here, I bought a new pram battery, but that seems to have made no difference.

Please help me save the life of an old friend

 

[MIDI_EVIL]

Hi, I hope someone out there can help me bring my 500ghz snow imac cdrw back to life.

The power button beeps very quietly and flashes once when pressed. Nothing else happens. No start-up. Nil response.

After a search of the forums here, I bought a new pram battery, but that seems to have made no difference.

Please help me save the life of an old friend

Hmm, could it be the harddrive?

Have you installed RAM lately?

Rich.

 

[Dont Hurt Me]

I would guess the harddrive is shot. You know what they say its not if it will fail but when.

 

[shaun jackson]

I installed ram about 4 years ago!

Sounds like very bad news, then - a hard drive failure? Is that expensive to fix?

 

[spinne1]

If your hard drive was shot, you would still be able to start up from a CD. Try booting from your OS X install CD (to get the drive door open, either push the button when your power light is on (right or soon after you press it), or manually pry it open (does it have a tray or is it slot loading?). If you can get a CD into the drive, boot while holding down the C key (do not let go until you see the screen boot up). If that does not work, I think you have a different issue, either a logic board failure, a power supply failure, or a CRT screen failure.

If your hard drive is shot, basically you probably lost all the information on it. It is possible to replace a hard drive pretty cheap (120 GB drives on ebay go for around $30-$40), but that does not give you your information back. You can put a hard drive in the machine yourself, but before you do that, find out what is wrong by trying the above. Try anything, such as holding the power button down while rebooting, or holding down Command-Option-O-F while rebooting, or Command-Option-P-R.

Are you running OS X or OS 9 or something else?

 

[dpaanlka]

It's not the hard drive.

If it were, a blinking question mark would appear on the screen. But since nothing is happening other than the power button blinking, I would imagine either your logic board, power supply, or the infamous G3 iMac's CRT flyback transformer has failed, or there is a horrendous RAM issue.

If you have two RAM modules, try removing one and boot with only one. If that doesn't work, try the other one. If you only have one RAM module, try finding some spare RAM to put in.

Keep in mind that is only one of the four likely problems with your iMac. But RAM is the easiest problem to fix.

 

[shaun jackson]

I really appreciate the replies, guys. Thanks.

Some nice helpful people on these forums.

I do have two ram sticks - I'll try removing one, and try the other ideas. Cheers.Still not very hopeful, though.