New iMac G4 with its own set of issues...

[BadGoldEagle]

Hi folks,

Yesterday I picked up a nice 1.25GHz Lamp (that's one hell of a lamp, never seen a lamp with so much horsepower!!!)

It works great, logic board wise. But I am having issues with the LCD and the Superdrive.

1/ LCD

It works but 3 bugs managed to squeeze themselves in and died. I can't get them out and it sucks since this is a fine example. No black spots or scratches or anything. I just can't live with that. I just cleaned a LCII which was full of the same stuff! Don't know what that is but apparently it's not that uncommon.

Pic:



I have found a brand spanking new panel with the same part number. It's expensive, yes, but at least it won't fail or have bugs in it!! 

I have to double check the specs, the 17" G4 uses a LM171W02 LC/Philips panel, but these LM171W02 have a lot of variants. I will open mine up to check. Will do that this week.

2/ Superdrive

Detects CDs but not DVDs. 

Will try the "patchburn" method first (before taking the display apart). But it that fails, which replacement drive should I go for? I don't want to spend much on the optical drive, I think the display is more important.

3/ USB Tiger installer.

I bought an 8gb usb stick (paid 6 bucks, wow, these things are ridiculously cheap nowadays) to put the Tiger Installer on. I used Disk Utility's restore feature but I guess it didn't work. The iMac doesn't recognise the drive as bootable. Now I realise that Mavericks can't properly create a APM partition, even though it still states it's APM... that's probably the problem with my boot usb. Will retry on the iMac.

I tried OF too, but failed. Do I really need to go to OF to boot from a USB on a USB 2.0 iMac G4? I'm a bit confused now.

Any help appreciated.

PS: People from the original iPod on modern mac thread... This is my idea of a good solution to use my ipod. I'm really dumb. I "solved" a problem by creating a new one!!

 

[bibilit]

The very first definition of a computer bug  ;D

Be careful, the screen surround is a weak point.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Thanks for the tip! I'll be extra careful.

Also, bibilit showed me how to create the installer USB properly, basically I didn't format the flash drive with the APM before restoring from the Tiger installer DVD... And apparently I had to insert the flash drive into the USB port labeled #1... Will try again tomorrow.

 

[Innes]

I feel your annoyance with this one, had a G4 iMac back in the day which got swamped with evil little bugs when the wheat in the adjacent field was harvested. They flocked to anything white. Two got into the center of the screen, but looking down through the transparent plastic around the top of the screen, i could see at least another 30/40 that had gotten stuck under that.

Through numerous other harvests, I never had that problem with any other computer :-/

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Well, I only have 3 and it's pretty annoying all right. Apparently that's it though.

The previous owner was an advertiser who lived in the countryside so I guess that matches up with your story. 

I have an LCII that I recapped three weeks ago (I still need to do the PSU) and you know, the LC has hollow feet, and well the feet well was halfway filled by dead insects! At least 150. It was properly disgusting and that coupled with the fact that it had a spider in it makes the LC my least favorite mac EVER. I never planned to keep it but now I REALLY hate it. Thank god I got it for free! I also got it from a place with a couple of farms around, so that explains it.

Note to future iMac G4 owners: Always buy one in the city!

I contacted another LCD supplier. He confirmed that this kind of thing happened a lot with old LCDs. His panels are thoroughly checked but since they were taken from working iMacs, I suspect this could happen again... even though I don't live in the countryside.

He sells grade A panels for 115 euros shipped (no scratches but their backlight is fading ever so slightly). I found brand new panels for 100 shipped (one year warranty!). I know this is a lot but I only got the iMac for 75... so the grand total would be about 175... but I'll put the old panel up on ebay for 15 euros. It's otherwise in excellent condition and I'm sure someone will be perfectly happy with it. I just can't live with it.

So that would bring the grand total to 160, which is still a good price for one of these. And the new display will probably look a lot better than the original unit!

 

[BadGoldEagle]

So I retried the USB installer, didn't work, again...

At this point I think I'm cursed or something.

Since the Superdrive ignores my blank DVDs, I decided to burn 4 CDs.

Stupidly I burned the first one at 58x speed (I selected the fastest speed as possible setting on toast 6.1) and obviously it failed. Damn, I thought Toast was supposed to be the best dvd burner software out there, and I thought it would have known that my drive couldn't handle 58x!!

Anyway, I burned my second disk at 8x and it worked superbly well. 

But here's another odd thing: pressing the letter 'c' at startup does nothing! It boots from the internal HD every time!

I was able to boot from the CD by selecting it with the "startup from" control panel.

Tomorrow, I'm going to burn the next 3 disks and attempt to install Tiger. 

But one thing bothers me: If I format the drive, will it automatically try to boot from the CD? Because as I said earlier, 'c' doesn't seem to do anything... 

Edit: nevermind, I forgot I could boot from the CD by holding the option key too.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Yay! Tiger is installed and is working perfectly.

CD #4 from the Mac garden was corrupted, didn't realise that until I burned it... So I had to fix the image and burn it again.

This whole operation cost the lives of 6 blank CDs. 4 of them got upgraded to OSX install CDs (highest rank) but sadly 2 of them had to be put down.

On the bright side, I now have a full set of Tiger CDs I might use with the PM G5, once I service its LCS that is...

Side note: Tiger is awesome. I use Spotlight a lot and it was really frustrating to use the Spotlight-less Panther!

New issue I have to tackle: the LCD screws. These are really tight and small! My tool couldn't take it and broke. And when it broke, I think it damaged one screw. I'll be ordering a new one soon (Luis/bibilit, do you happen to have a good one of those?). I hope I'll be able to extract that screw.

I don't need to take the entire display apart but I need the exact part number to order the replacement panel...

 

[bibilit]

(Luis/bibilit, do you happen to have a good one of those?)

Don't tkink so, 

 

[BadGoldEagle]

I had another go with the tools I had and by applying a bit more force I was able to take those damn screws off. Opened my display up and all seems bug-free. I just have those three things right in front of me. It could have been a lot worse... I still want to replace that display though. Will report back once that's done.

I'm using the iMac to type this. TenFourFox works like a dream. Even youtube sorta works. I also successfully sync'ed my ipod, finally!! Really happy with this machine. It is a tad slow on the internet (I'm using Wifi, and this only has 802.11g...), but G4s still rock!

The keyboard was in terrible state. I just finished restoring it. I had to buy a .05 inch hex key because for some reason Apple decided to use yet another screw size for the keyboard... The tool took ages to arrive to my front door. I'm seriously considering buying the iFixit screwdriver kit.

One thing though I have noticed with this keyboard is that it is particularly hard to type on it. It requires way too much force to press down on a key. I'm not sure if this is normal. Maybe the membrane has perished?

Oh and I wanted to add a temperature meter to monitor the CPU among other things but apparently this iMac doesn't have that much sensors?

 

[Innes]

I've on occasion, melted the end of an in-expensive plastic pen onto a screw and let it dry for a ghetto screwdriver, in cases where i wasn't spending upwards of a fiver for what may have been a single use item. Its only really safe to do if there isn't anything sensitive around the screws location.

 

[BadGoldEagle]

Great tip! I only ended up paying less than one euro for the keyboard bit so that's okay.