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westothemax · 04-28-2004, 10:03 AM

A client brought in an iMac to my work - from <a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58669">this </a> page I can tell it is a 1999 iMac DV.

The problem is it won't boot. When pressing the power it does the Apple Chime, but immediatly powers itself off. I thought this may be something with the Analog board that powers the CRT - I read that it was common for the Flyback Transformer on the Analog board to overheat and crap out. It said that sometimes you can plug in an external monitor via the VGA port on the back of the iMac and have it work normally. I tried this and I had the same problem as before. The fix for this is to swap the Analog board out for a new one. New ones are pretty pricey though, but we do have a similar model iMac that we can take parts from. The parts iMac is a Summer 2000 DV.

But then I started to find some information about the firmware needing to be updated before upgrading from MacOS 9 to MacOS X. If the firmware wasn't updated, then a similar problem with booting up would occur. I will have to double check whether or not anyone had tried to upgrade this to MacOS X.

So I'm stuck. In the first case, the consensus on Mac message boards is that the "newer" CRT iMacs (with slot loading CD drives) rarely suffer from Analog board failure because of improved circuitry (I guess it was a common problem in the early iMacs with tray loading CD-ROMs). Also, if it was the Analog board, then the external monitor port has been said to work. But perhaps the new circuitry of the slot loading iMacs could cause this to change?

Should I try to swap the Analog board? It looks kind of scary, working so close to the CRT and all those capacitors and such. I've never done it before, but I'm up for the task. How would I fix it if it had a firmware problem? Apple says you have to update the firmware by booting from the hard drive, not the cd drive or over a network. I can't even get the thing to boot. I was thinking of maybe swapping out the hard drive for another with MacOS 9 installed. Unfortunatly, the parts iMac had its hard drive removed. The other Macs we have are older, and I'm not sure if it would work.

In the case of Windows, if you swapped hard drives between two PCs with different hardware, they won't boot into Windows. I assume this is the case with Macs as well.

Anyway, any helpful comments and/or suggestions are appreciated. I need to get this taken care of ASAP.

04-28-2004, 10:03 AM	#1 (permalink)
westothemax Insane Location: Bay Area	iMac not booting up. Need to fix ASAP A client brought in an iMac to my work - from <a href="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58669">this </a> page I can tell it is a 1999 iMac DV. The problem is it won't boot. When pressing the power it does the Apple Chime, but immediatly powers itself off. I thought this may be something with the Analog board that powers the CRT - I read that it was common for the Flyback Transformer on the Analog board to overheat and crap out. It said that sometimes you can plug in an external monitor via the VGA port on the back of the iMac and have it work normally. I tried this and I had the same problem as before. The fix for this is to swap the Analog board out for a new one. New ones are pretty pricey though, but we do have a similar model iMac that we can take parts from. The parts iMac is a Summer 2000 DV. But then I started to find some information about the firmware needing to be updated before upgrading from MacOS 9 to MacOS X. If the firmware wasn't updated, then a similar problem with booting up would occur. I will have to double check whether or not anyone had tried to upgrade this to MacOS X. So I'm stuck. In the first case, the consensus on Mac message boards is that the "newer" CRT iMacs (with slot loading CD drives) rarely suffer from Analog board failure because of improved circuitry (I guess it was a common problem in the early iMacs with tray loading CD-ROMs). Also, if it was the Analog board, then the external monitor port has been said to work. But perhaps the new circuitry of the slot loading iMacs could cause this to change? Should I try to swap the Analog board? It looks kind of scary, working so close to the CRT and all those capacitors and such. I've never done it before, but I'm up for the task. How would I fix it if it had a firmware problem? Apple says you have to update the firmware by booting from the hard drive, not the cd drive or over a network. I can't even get the thing to boot. I was thinking of maybe swapping out the hard drive for another with MacOS 9 installed. Unfortunatly, the parts iMac had its hard drive removed. The other Macs we have are older, and I'm not sure if it would work. In the case of Windows, if you swapped hard drives between two PCs with different hardware, they won't boot into Windows. I assume this is the case with Macs as well. Anyway, any helpful comments and/or suggestions are appreciated. I need to get this taken care of ASAP. Last edited by westothemax; 04-28-2004 at 10:05 AM..