G5 Down! – Folder with question mark on startup – Help?!

[Aaron Neitz]

Put the old RAM in

Put in you Tiger/Panther/Battlecat install disc and startup G5 holding down C

When the installer comes up, ignore it, thereshould be an option in the top menus to select boot drive

hopefully your hard drive will appear in that menu, and you can restart and it should get fixed

[Jim Bruce]

Hi Charlie,

Thanks for chiming in.

I tried starting up from the CD with the new RAM in and it’s not even able to verify or repair the hard drive – which it’s not even seeing the name for- just comes up with an error off the bat..

Do you think I still should try with old RAM only?

I’ll give it a shot.

But curious if you think the RAM would affect the computer’s ability to see the hard drive.

Appreciate your help.

Jim

[Jim Bruce]

Update:

Tried starting up from system disk and repairing drive in disk utility – it didn’t recognize the volume – would have had to erase.

Tried removing the new RAM and starting from system disk – same result in disk utility.

It’s certainly possible that my 3 plus year-old internal hard drive decided to call it quits a day after I gave it some new RAM…

But I find that quite a coincidence…

Thoughts?

Vendors for replacement drives on the net? In LA?

Things I’m not thinking of?

[John Pale]

check the cables on the internal hard drive…is it even remotely possible you bumped into it and loosened them up while installing the RAM?

[David Bogie]

Troubleshooting and debugging a startup disk can take several days of screwing around.
If the info on the drive is important, run to CompUSA and purchase Disk Warrior, Symantec, and one or two other drive/OS repair applications. They all do things slightly differently and look at different aspects of the OS drive.
While you’re there, purchase an external FW drive that is about twice the size of your startup drive. You will need this as the location to which you will attempt to copy/clone/rebuild your startup drive.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[Annaël Beauchemin]

I work on a first generation G5 that did the same thing a few weeks ago. It would not boot, displaying a question mark. When booted on the Mac OS CD, Disk Utils would say “Error: could not complete underlying task on exit” or somethin along those lines. I didn’t bother running diskwarrioir on it because it was behaving oddly (slow seeks, hangs, etc) before stopping.

That drive was a maxtor “diamond max plus 9” drive. I had many other of those diamond max 9 drives fail on me so if you happen to be using one of those, I woudn’t be surprised it failed.

[Jim Bruce]

ola coyote,

yes, that’s the exact error message I got in disk utility.

And I don’t think it’s good news either.

I’ll sum this experience up by saying I really wish I had known top shelf drives were available for under 100 bucks.

I would have cloned my hard disk long ago and had the backup there for day’s like yesterday…

Lesson learned…

[Aaron Neitz]

Well you got that Kernal Panic and had to shut down via power button. It’s highly possible that the new RAM had a hiccup and caused the system to crash…perhaps when the HD was accessing data and it fried the boot sectors…. Or when you were forced to power down the CPU maybe the hard drive was stuck in some search mode, etc…. and then it got fried when the box powered off.