John8520
Well-known member
I happened across a very reasonably priced iMac G4 today and decided I just couldn't turn it down. It's a 15" 800MHz model, one that can actually run OS9, which I find very appealing. The machine is very clean outside and only had minimal dust inside. The owner didn't know anything about it and had no peripherals or accessories. It was upgraded with a single stick pf 512MB PC133, but the 60GB HDD and combo drive are stock. No airport card or SODIMM RAM installed.
While it does boot, the only video I get is flat white. Cmd-Opt-P-R resets the PRAM (at least, I can hear it reboot multiple times) but I cannot (visually) enter either open firmware or the option boot menu. Some cursory googling has suggested this may be a hard drive problem (which makes no sense to me?) but I put the drive in one of my G4 towers and it works perfectly - it even has a fresh install of 9.2.2 on it, so it should boot in the iMac.
I have replaced the PRAM battery with a known good one, and have swapped in RAM from one of my G4s but it seems to make no difference. I've also tried leaving it on the white screen for a while but nothing seems to happen. When I leave the drive in it sounds like its booting, with some drive activity. Unfortunately I do not have a mini-VGA adapter at hand to test video out with.
Any suggestions?
While it does boot, the only video I get is flat white. Cmd-Opt-P-R resets the PRAM (at least, I can hear it reboot multiple times) but I cannot (visually) enter either open firmware or the option boot menu. Some cursory googling has suggested this may be a hard drive problem (which makes no sense to me?) but I put the drive in one of my G4 towers and it works perfectly - it even has a fresh install of 9.2.2 on it, so it should boot in the iMac.
I have replaced the PRAM battery with a known good one, and have swapped in RAM from one of my G4s but it seems to make no difference. I've also tried leaving it on the white screen for a while but nothing seems to happen. When I leave the drive in it sounds like its booting, with some drive activity. Unfortunately I do not have a mini-VGA adapter at hand to test video out with.
Any suggestions?