Quicksilver has VGA issue

I got a Power Mac G4 QS! So I decided to plug in my HP VGA monitor... the monitor didn't even flash. Nothing. The quicksilver hummed along, not sure what was happening but doing it anyways... but no monitor. It works, because I've tested it with my other computers. I jiggled the card, as well.

Goose egg. xx(

I think this was a common problem with the Quicksilver, but not sure.

If you have an extra Mac video card, you might try that, as the one in the QS could've died.

Also, it might need a PRAM reset.

If a PRAM reset doesn't help, it wouldn't hurt to reseat the card (physically removing and reinstalling it a couple times to clean the contacts of any oxidation). You might also spray a bit of contact cleaner on both the card and in the slot, if you have some (in lieu of contact cleaner, you can gently rub the card's contacts with a pencil eraser).

Hopefully this helps....

c

I found out that the PRAM battery (Tadiran) had died. RIP little battery (2001 - 2016)

also, I'm a bit stupid... How do you reset the PRAM in these machines? I was looking around, but could not find it on Apple.com.

I will try reseating the card again, as I tried jiggling it a little while ago, but that didn't work.

EDIT: I reseated the card, and the RAM as well.

Should be a reset switch on the board.

Is it that button next to the heatsink?

EDIT: I press that button, and the system shuts off. Still doesn't display. UGH!

One thing I probably forgot to mention is that the mouse/keyboard don't light up either... sorry for not mentioning that.

Carboy7 said:

I found out that the PRAM battery (Tadiran) had died. RIP little battery (2001 - 2016)

Click to expand...

Think before you speak, me!   Apparently, the Tadi battery in the machine was actually full voltage, so that's either a good sign or bad sign.

I'm a bit desperate right now, having unplugged the HDD, taken out 2 of the 3 RAM modules out, etc. I also found a loose screw inside, so maybe something shorted out on the Logic Board. Hoping nothing bad happened, because I butchered my previous attempt at a CUDA reset, and am currently trying a new reset. Anyone have any hope for this machine, because I sure don't.

Has the machine chimed or beeped at all when attempting power on? Typically you'll hear a series of beeps if there's a RAM issue or if it's unable to initialise the graphics card. If there's no chime or beeps, I'd suspect power supply, logic board, or CPU daughterboard. The power supply on my Quicksilver went kaput and behaved like that. I disconnected the power and data cables on my hard drive and optical drive. I managed to get chime and video in that state, so I tried different drives. Same behaviour: no chime, no video, just fans and power LED. Swapped the PSU and it started up and booted with drives connected.

It lives! I started swapping PC cards, the RAM, etc. I removed a USB card, and now it chimes and boots to a question mark. Great... So I brought over my iMac G3 Blue Dalmatian, and tore apart that machine for its working SCSI HDD.

I needed a ribbon cable for it, so my dad dismantled his eMachines eMonster "Never Obsolete" and tried to find an SCSI ribbon cable from it. He did, and put it on the SCSI port on the logic board.

That's IDE, not SCSI.

Oh... Whoops! I'm still learning the internals of the iMac anyway, so thanks for the correction!

Carboy7 said:

I removed a USB card, and now it chimes and boots to a question mark.

Click to expand...

Morbid curiosity: was it a Belkin USB card, 4 ports on the back, one on the inside, with a blue PCB?

That sounds like the Staples branded USB card I got on deep discount...I was gonna put it in my G3 but now I'm having reservations.

The good news is once you put it in, if it causes problems, once you take it out, it should eventually spring back to life.

Good to know. I'm keeping an eye out for USB cards for my two Old World Power Macs, so this helps me know what to avoid. (It's less of a priority now, because the two machines just got FireWire cards.)

The USB card is an unnamed card, actually. It's black and has two ports on the back.

I don't know if there's very wide base of evidence that there's something wrong with this card, or if perhaps there's something wrong with, say, the power supply on these machines.

I had a G3 "fail" after a while with the 5-port Belkin card, and a friend had an MDD G4 fail with the same kind of card, but I haven't seen other reports of the same thing and I put the card in a Dell PC and it worked perfectly fine. The friend with the G4 later reported that a replacement power supply ran the card perfectly well.

Huh. Cory, what do you think is happening to the power supplies? Because this seems to be a relatively common problem with the machine.

Something weird is that the guy who gave me the machine in question said that it worked fine when he last tested it.

My guess is that the Quicksilver power supplies are on the edge of being overloaded when upgraded video cards and/or PCI cards are installed. The label says "360 watts maximum output", but that includes the ADC monitor power. 3.3v, 5v, 12v have a combined maximum of 240w, which seems pretty weak. My replacement supply has gone on the fritz, so I'm contemplating modifying an ATX supply or recapping the original one.

It could be that these machines have weak power supplies to begin with, or that they aged particularly bad.

The friend with a G4's power supply failed spectacularly while it was still under AppleCare, or very shortly thereafter. He replaced it, and it has, as I'm understanding, been running solidly for the past decade.

My Blue-And-White probably still turns on -- I should go pull it out and test it, because I happen to have it here in my house -- but I don't know what's on it or necessarily have time to do a lot of reinstallation. The good news is that I have 8.6 and 9.2.2 CDs hanging around, the bad news is that I don't know the state of its hard disk.

When this all happened, my blue-and-white was already a little old. I'm thinking this was in 2005 or so, so it was six years old and that's pretty much beyond the normal professional lifespan of a desktop computer. Even (especially) one from about that time. I also didn't get it new, so I don't know if anything happened to it previously to weaken the power supply. I know that the original motherboard was at one point replaced with one from a Yikes! Power Macintosh G4, but I don't have any reason to believe the power supply was swapped at that time.

It could be that my unit's power supply suffered some kind of undue stress, perhaps something that itself caused the motherboard to fail, but other than that one USB card (which didn't cause any problems for the Dell PC I put it in) it performed admirably.

I'll stress again that I really don't have enough data about that one card to formally accuse it of anything.

The only real data I have is that...

I had the card, ran it in my blue-and-white G3 with a Yikes motherboard until the machine stopped turning on. I removed the card, pushed buttons to no avail, until randomly it booted up a few days later. PUt the card back in, same thing. I eventually stopped putting that card back in, and I eventually also stopped having problems with the system.

My friend had the card, ran it in his MDD G4 until his power supply caught fire and/or exploded massively. He put a new PSU in the system, and if I'm remembering correctly, put the card back in, and it has run fine since.

To add to what rsolberg says though, the ADC monitors, especially the 17-inch CRT ones, are said to have caused problems for the power supplies of those G4 systems. That's sawtooth or gig-eth and newer stuff, though.