Retro Mac Troubleshooting
My main retro mac that I use on a regular basis has been having some issues lately. It’s a PowerMac G4 MDD from 2003. It may have been multiple issues most of which I have fixed or ruled out. First I thought it was bad memory, then I thought it was the hard drive configuration, then I reinstalled the OS, and still it shut down at random or upon sleep.
Now I replaced the clock battery and reset the PMU. It worked once and slept correctly too. Then it wouldn’t turn on other than a flash of the power light or the show the grey startup apple for a moment. It would often shut off right when the CRT tried to turn on, which is powered from the mac’s power supply through the ADC cable. I hope it’s not the main power supply that’s failing, if so that's about a $150 repair that I won’t be doing any time soon. :(
Now it randomly turned on fine, no idea why. It’s been on for 20 minutes.
(Jan 29th 2017 update)
I still can’t sleep the computer but it seems to work fine otherwise.
