Uh-oh... Boot failure, out of the blue

Got nothing but a loud fan sound when I turned on my G5's power this morning. No chime, nothing.
I forced shutdown by holding the power button; then I disconnected the power cord for a minute.
Next boot was completely normal, and it has been running quietly and happily for a couple of hours. (The only thing I did differently was to turn off my external G-Drive before starting up. I seriously doubt that's relevant, but thought I should mention it.)
Should I be concerned? Did it likely just need its PMU reset for some reason (if memory serves as to what the power disconnect does)?
My one other worry about this Mac is that it seems memory-challenged lately, but that happens mostly, if not always, when I have been working on my increasingly media-intensive MySpace profile. The computer has only 1 GB of RAM.

Hi everyone,
Well, surprise surprise, it did it again, following an abrupt crash of Firefox when I clicked on a link in Google Reader--one of Google's own functions, mind you, not my RSS junk. Same deal: seemed to power on but then just fidgeted, no chime, and finally the fans would roar up and I'd have to force shutdown by holding the power button.
And this time, it really freaked out. At first it would boot if I held down the shift key, but that only seemed to work about three times. (The Apple tech who discharged it last night said it was probably just being a diva and the shift key only SEEMED to be making it boot.) I can't remember whether I ever succeeded in making it boot from the system DVD; it never would boot from the Leopard-enabled partition on my external drive, although various views clearly show this sector to be bootable. When it wouldn't do that and I didn't know how to reset the startup drive, I gave up, put it in its box, and made a quick drop to Apple.
One week later, it's back, and it's up, but we don't know what happened. Just like a car on the fritz, it booted fine at the Apple store. Many times, under duress, they tell me. Two different techs phoned me about it, and the second one spent a lot of time on the phone with me to make sure no possible culprit had gone unmentioned. All possible diagnostic routines were thoroughly implemented, I'm told, and they found nothing. Nor was there anything in the logs to indicate that the power supply had been failing. What I get from my conversation with the second guy and the guy who handled the discharge is that this was one of those things that can't be diagnosed if it's not happening. Some kind of intermittent flakiness, most likely on the part of the logic board. Both said I might have gotten out of the jam by pushing the reset button on the logic board, and the last guy showed me where it was and gave me something nonconducting to poke it with. (I forgot to ask him to explain why that remedy was different from disconnecting the power cord, which IS--they acknowledged--supposed to reset the PMU on this model.)
You gotta love Apple culture. I was treated very kindly and attentively throughout, up to and including the young man who was deployed to roll the G5 out of the store and handle the awkward and strenuous task of getting it situated (wheels and all) on the back seat of my little old two-door automobile. (Edit: And, I neglected to mention, they charged me a grand total of nothing.)
I'm reporting all this mainly in case it might help anyone else, but if anyone has any thoughts about what happened and/or how to prevent recurrence, I'm all ears. Ditto re: Leopard versions, which I'm about to go research in the discussions now. At some point during last weekend's struggle I put the machine back to 10.5, and obviously I should update that, but I have my doubts about 10.5.6 and am wondering if I should just do 10.5.5 for now. Opinions welcome (but I'm not going to sweat that decision for more than about an hour.)
Kudos to my PowerMac 7600, which got me through the week quite ably for a 1996 model with nothing more than minor RAM and storage upgrades. It is a grand old workhorse if ever there was one.
Message was edited by: Nina R

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rewsan wrote:
As I don't want anything new to be recorded on the old box can I set up my new black box and still watch the recordings on the old box?
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Uh-oh... Boot failure, out of the blue

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