G3 will not boot; "question folder"

I have a G3 that will not boot. It will chime, the power light and the fan come on. Then I get a blank screen. After several minutes, a folder icon with a question mark in it is displayed. Does this mean that the disk is not spinning up? If it's not the disk, any ideas?
thanks!
-liz

Liz,
You will need an installation CD or some other boot disk, disc or hard drive. We frequently used zip disks with minimal systems installed on them to boot various computers. If your computer has a SCSI controller card you can also boot from an external hard drive.
Second, you will need to decide how much you want to spend on a B&W mac. G4s are now available for under $50 and are far more capable machines. The B&W macs were not Apple's finest hour. They are useful if you are patient and willing to tinker. I still use my platinum G3s but have long since abandoned the problematic B&W macs. Still, if that is what you have, make the most of it and be happy until something better comes along.
Before spending money on a battery, remember the "warm boot" as a test option. You indicated that after several minutes you did get signs of life in the form of a question mark. Once that appears on the screen, press the reset button on the front of the computer. This will allow the computer to start a second time with power already flooding the motherboard. Sometimes this is all it takes to get a better result. More likely, though, your system folder on the hard drive has become corrupted or the hard drive has failed.
If you have files on the hard drive and want to save them, you will need a way to back them up. Moving the hard drive to a computer that works or adding a second hard drive with a working system folder can solve that problem. Post back with what your goals are. Tinkering is great. Putting money into a B&W mac is not the best use of hard earned cash. You can also look for a user group with live bodies to help you locally with parts - swaps. Options abound. Give us a few more details and we can be more specific with solutions. Include information about what city or country you are in as that will also determine the feasibility of some options.
Jim

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Hi.
I have a 2009 Quad 3.0Ghz Mac Pro that will not boot up.
I went to it this morning and the beach ball was spinning. I could not get it to stop and as a last resort, turned it off. It has been working fine, although
I have noticed a little slow (Could be me, though).
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Will not boot to OS 9

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Chuck:
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Power Mac G4 400 MHz (AGP graphics) will not boot from hard drive

I have a Mac G4 400 MHz (AGP graphics) Machine Model: PowerMac 3.1 CPU Type:PowerPC G4 (2.8)
When I try to boot from the hard drive I get the folder with the flashing question Mark. The Machine will start up from the OSX 10.4 installer disk.
The system was running OSX 10.4.9 fine. I began to have problems with the hard drive, so I replaced it with an old Maxtor 5T040H4 40Gig Apple branded drive that I had sitting around.
The drive is jumpered (r50) for Master/Single.
I erased the drive in the old G4 using disk utility and wrote all zeros. I then used my store bought Tiger 10.4 install disk to install 10.4 on the drive.
After restarting I still get the flashing question mark. If I leave the Install disk in the DVD drive the system will attempt to install again.
I have zapped the PRAM, pressed the CUDA button, removed the battery and let the system sit unplugged for over and hour and it still will not boot from the hard drive.
To test the drive I removed it and put it in a Granite Digital firewire enclosure and connected it to another mac. The drive shows up and the system appears to be installed correctly.
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Hi! If Tom's solution doesn't work I would reboot from the install disc and then partition the drive as 1 partition instead of erasing it. Sounds like the driver on the disk is too old and installing a new partition map should write a new driver to the drive that is compatible with Tiger. Other than that it is possible that the drive has a spin delay jumper enabled and the drive isn't spinning up fast enough and the computer isn't looking long enough for the drive. Tom

PowerMac G4 Will not boot

My Mac G4 at work will not boot. When it tries to boot up, all I can see is a grey screen with a flashing folder icon. I've tried to use the command-option-p-r key combo to re-start the machine, no luck. I know they shut the power down last night, but im positive that the computer was off. TIA
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OSX Panther
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obey46, welcome to Apple Discussions.
See A flashing question mark appears when you start your Mac
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58042
If the power was Off for a while, the internal memory battery may have discharged. See Mac PRAM, NVRAM, CUDA/PMU & Battery Tutorial
 Cheers, Tom

2009 Mac Pro will not boot up under Windows

I have an Early 2009 Mac Pro system (Mac Pro 4,1) and I've had this system for 3 years already and have been working under OS X with this system ever since I purchased it.
However, when I tried to boot off my Windows disk, something very interesting happens. The Mac Pro WILL NOT boot up off the Windows disk or a known working Windows partition if two monitors are connected. Upon holding down the option key and selecting the Windows partition, I will get a black screen on one monitor (the one connected via Mini Displayport) and the other screen receives no signal and will enter standby and the system is halted. It does not respond to keystrokes, there is no hard drive activity, no measured power increase on the UPS, no apparent network activity, nothing. The only way to exit this scenario (from what I can tell) is to power off the machine, disconnect the display on DVI, power on the machine again, select the Windows partition wait for the system to reach the login window and reconnect the DVI monitor (at which time Windows recognizes it immediately and the system works fine again).
My question to the community is, does anybody know why this is happening and is there a known fix for this? Quite frankly, having to disconnect a monitor just to restart is very tedious and frustrating.
I have two Samsung P2350 monitors attached to an ATI Radeon HD 4870 (512MB, from Apple). One is monitor is connected via directly DVI and the other is using a Mini Displayport to DVI adapter. Both monitors work fine under OS X with no issue. At first, I thought that this may be a driver issue on the Windows side and after installing all the latest updates and drivers the issue is still apparent. From what I can tell, this doesn't seem like a software issue but rather a firmware or EFI issue as this happens before Windows even loads.
If anyone knows of a fix or what to do in this situation, or if you are also having this issue, I would love to hear your input!
Thank you!
For the record, I am running all the latest software builds on the OS X side (10.7.4, not that it would really matter at this point). I have also disconnected all unnecessary equipment in a trial and error scenario but the results are still the same.
The system passes all ASD testing.
The full specification of the computer and all connected equipment are as follows:
2009 Mac Pro (4,1) 8-Core
2x Intel Xeon Nehalem 2.66GHz Quad-Core CPUs
16GB DDR3 ECC 1066MHz RAM (Apple Branded)
Two OWC 120GB SSDs (One for OS X, the other for Windows 7 x64) - These are in place of my optical drives.
4x 2TB WD Black Hard drives for storage.
Two Samsung P2350 Monitors connected via DVI. (One using a Mini Displayport to DVI adapter).

In Windows I am using the latest (12.4) Catalyst Software Suite, 64 bit of course, downloaded directly from AMD's site after installing the drivers from Boot Camp.
As for installing Windows I used an original (not burned) installation media (Disk is in a pristine condition). And yes, Windows is fine, the problem just seems to be getting the system to boot up Windows with that second monitor. However if the "problem monitor" is disconnected the system boots fine 100% of the time and connecting it later after booting the system will still operate properly.
For the sake of arguement I swapped monitor cables and connected the "second" monitor to the mini displayport adapter to verify that it wasn't a cabling issue and I'm still yielding the same issues.
As for GPU testing, I've played games (Crysis, Grand Theft Auto IV, Battlefield 3, etc.) and I've had no issues with the card or stability.
You would think that Apple would try to find a fix for this, especially considering the caliber of this machine.

Will not boot up on 1st try

Hey everyone,
I am having a strange problem, My computer will not boot up on the 1st try after it has been shut off for 2 hrs or more. Here are my specs and then I will go into more detail. I like to use pictures because some of the terminology escapes my vocabulary.
MSI P6N Diamond LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 Conroe 3.0GHz 4M shared L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor
ZALMAN CNPS9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
2 X Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive In Raid 0
XFX GeForce 8800GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card
Kingston HyperX 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
BFG Tech 800W Power Supply>>+3.3V@24A,+5V@30A,+12V1@20A,+12V2@20A,+12V3@20A, +12V4@20A,[email protected],[email protected]
2 X LITE-ON 16X DVD±R DVD Burner
SONY Black 1.44MB 3.5" Internal Floppy Drive
COOLER MASTER Stacker 830 Evolution Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Computer Case
Logitech Z-5300 Speakers 5.1
Samsung SyncMaster 204B monitor
Logitech G5 mouse
Windows XP home, SP2
Build Date 11/26/2007
Problem:
After being shut off for more than 2 hours my computer will not boot up on the 1st try. It goes to a message that says"Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key". I shut it down using the power button, wait for the hard drives to stop spinning, and then hit the power again and it starts up just fine. It will restart just fine also as many time as I want to restart it, after it has been running in windows. Once it is running, it runs terrific, no problems at all.
If you go right into the bios after sitting for a while you see this in the boot sequence, notice there is no hard drives(Nvidia Stripe)in the boot sequence.
After shutting it down and starting right back up this is what you see in the boot sequence. This pic is from a different time, thats why the boot sequence is different.
Here is a short youtube video (2:10 sec) made to help show the problem. (I called it a Cold boot Storage problem for another thread) just ignore that.
Things I have done to try to solve the problem:
1. Update the bios
2.I have moved the boot sequence around, Foppy1st, or CD 1st, ect. and even disabled the [USB:HP Photosm] in the boot sequence, Hard Drives are 1st now.
3.Replaced the Mobo Battery thinking that it was not remembering the boot sequence
4.Checked that the Hard Drives are connected to the correct plugs (6-7) on the motherboard, and that the raid connector JP1 was shorted out for Raid 0 and the blue indicator light was flashing.
* Just a note in this area. I did set up the Raid 0 with a tech from MSI because I was having an issue with the initial set up, and I did use the Nvidia raid drivers that came with the motherboard. Pchas01 in another thread thought that this could be part of the issue because it is not necessary to load the drivers when you set up the Motherboard in the Raid mode.
F10 and look in the Raid Array
5. Pulled the jumper off of JP1 and it just went to the "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" screen much faster, but would never boot up after 5 tries. Put the jumper back in and started up on the 2nd try like the normal problem.
6.Went into the On-Chip ATA devices in the bios and Changed the Raid Mode to an IDE, I cannot F10 and get into the Raid Array now, but I guess that is normal.
Now this is what my boot sequence currently looks like.
That is the point that I am right now. It runs great, games are awesome on it. Its just does not want to start up on the 1st attempt.
Thanks for any help on this
Chris aka Fritzpeed novice builder

Thanks for the reply,
I started with the easy fixes first, changed the sata cables, and tried different power supply connectors. Both tests had same results, still boots up on 2nd try. I did not know how soon the problem would re-occur after it has been shut down, my shortest time so far is 25 minutes.
Quote
Why only one RAID channel is enabled? Array can't be detected in that way...
Well right now, it is not even set up that way, in my #6 problem solving, it was suggested that I turn the Raid Mode off and try [IDE] to see if that made a difference,"because I don't need Raid enabled for the hardware raid". It did not, it only booted to the "Reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press a key" window about 60 seconds faster. It is currently set up in this way.
This is how it looks in my On-Chip ATA Devices
How do I check this?
Quote
Does the problem persist when you use Silicon RAID instead Nvidia RAID?
I am still working on getting the seagate diagnostics to work, I am getting an error message before I can even test them.
I do have another question. Why is my HP Printer showing up in the Hard drive test, and also why is it showing up in my boot sequence, is this normal?
And speaking of boot sequences I got in there again just now and saw 2 [USB:HP Photosm]
Thanks again, still working on testing hard drives.
Chris

Mac Pro will not boot - HD and Machine are fine.

Greetings, and thank you in advance for your wisdom.
I have a 12-core Mac Pro, and she has been running like a dream. Once a month I run Onyx. Yesterday I did the same and upon reboot I got the grey apple screen and the spinning progress wheel that never stops spinning.
1. I repaired the HD via Disk Utility. All is fine.
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4. I installed Snow Leopard (still using this) on the new drive to make sure the computer was happy. It fires up fine.
5. Everything is disconnected from the Mac Pro
So, I have obvious, and idiotically damaged the start-up disk using Onyx (assumption).
My life would be much better knowing I could do something that would enable me to boot from my current start-up and that's where I seek your wisdom.
Another question would be: If the above is not possible, if I install a fresh OS on the new drive, and then begin to replace all of the folders from the old drive (applications, library, etc.) will I be able to access my files as I did before. My issue is that I use this for music production, and there are literally close to 100 plugins that all have been registered. Going back through that process again would be days of labor, as some of these were purchases years ago. Tracking down serials would be a task. I think you understand.
So any advice that might prevent me from having to do as I said above will be wonderful.
Thank you all so much.
Lance

Under some circumstances, you may need to reinstall Mac OS X. You can reinstall Mac OS X while keeping your files and user settings intact.
from:
Mac OS X 10.6: Reinstalling Mac OS X
If your Hardware is functioning correctly, and your disk has no un-repaired Directory problems [Hint: run Disk Utility ( Repair Disk ) first] then re-installing Mac OS X modifies ONLY the files that are part of Mac OS X. Your Added Applications, User files (which contain preferences and serial numbers) are not supposed to be touched.

G3 will not boot; "question folder"

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