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.

I'm not positive, but I seem to remember if you try to upgrade to OS X without upgrading the firmware, it will warn you of such and either upgrade it for you or tell you to do as much.

Good to know... thanks for the tip.

Buy a PC...

Sorry no help here, but it had to be said... :lol:

I was thinking about suggesting it, but I didn't think the customer would've taken it too well. My opinion of Macs just went to hell after working on this iMac. Maybe the towers are a little better to work on, but these things are a real pain.

The imacs are a pain in the ass to trouble shoot since it's it's built as all one unit...the tower are much easier to troubleshoot hardware problems :)

Do macs even have tech support? If so call them, they are probably the only ones who can help you.

try scouring the apple support forums on apple's website. their online documentation is really good, and i'm sure someone else has had this problem too...

iMac's are a tremendous pain in the ass to crack open and do anything with the innards. The original iMacs you had to do serious disassembely in order to even add RAM. At least you can do that reletivly easily now, but reardless it's a pain if anything hardwarewise goes wrong.

Apple only offers live on the phone tech support for a year after purchase unless you purchase their extended support plan, but the forums and online documentation are very helpful and free.

If you live near an Apple Store, you should be able to take in your iMac, and the "Apple Geniuses" usually will fix it, or at least tell you what's wrong, for free.

Just out of curiosity, have you tried booting off the Install CD, if you could even get the CD in before it craps out?

Did you try booting into open firmware? I believe that you key combination in COMMAND+OPTION+O+F. It can be a real pain in the ass to get the command recognized. If I remember correctly, you have to press and hold the keys after the startup chime but before the screen comes to life.

If you get it to take, it should give you a white screen w. black text.

Type
init-nvram
reset all (might be reset-all)
reboot

Also recommend zapping the PRAM restart and press and hold command+option+P+R

you should hear the intial startup chime, keep holding the keys, you should hear another startup chime. Do this 2-3 time (just keep holding the keys and it will keep booting.

Check for loose or bad ram chips.
Macs are very picky when it comes to ram. I had to switch out ram to get OS X to install because it didn't like one of the DIMMs that I had installed.

Check the battery.

Is there anything other than a Keyboard and mouse connected. I've heard of Mac's not booting because of an overloaded USB bus.

I'm not sure about iMacs, but many G3's have what is called a CUDA switch. A small push button on the Logic Board near the PCI slots (on Desktop PowerMacs) It is basically a hard reset button.

Good Luck

Dan