I’m not going to live this down for a while…
I got back from a walk yesterday to find that Tranquility, my iMac G5, had shut herself down. She wouldn’t start up. That’s when the trouble started.
Trying to start her up caused the following symptoms:
The white power light comes on (only once the power button is released).
There is no startup chime.
The screen remains dark.
Very faint clicks are heard, like the hard drive is trying to work.
The CD drive won’t accept a disc.
After about 30 to 45 seconds the fan spins up very loud.
So, I couldn’t even try to boot from an installation disc. I was worried, mainly for several course projects worth of data on my hard drive.
Fortunately I still have Ginger, my G3 PowerBook, so the first port of call was Apple’s iMac support site. The troubleshooting assistant didn’t have the answers to such a serious problem, so it threw me into a chat session with an Apple support agent.
Long story short: I couldn’t boot into safe mode, or single user mode – because the startup process wasn’t getting far enough! So I opened up the back and tried resetting the SMU, responsible for controlling power regulation. But that didn’t work.
I got passed along to an Apple product specialist agent, who asked me to check the diagnostic LEDs. Her verdict: I need a replacement midplane board.
This means I’m going to test Apple’s DIY repair service and remove the entire logic board from my machine. It’s quite a big job since I’ll need to remove all the other components – superdrive, RAM, power supply, screen inverter, hard drive, airport card – and then swop in the new midplane. So hopefully she should wake up better than new.
All in all, putting to one side the crippling inconvenience of having a faulty computer, the tech support was pretty good – not to mention free given my ‘net connection – and I suppose it’s being replaced as quickly as public holidays will permit. The only onion in the sandwich of the process was ordering the replacement part, which should have been processed easily (and cheaply) online, but it wouldn’t let me login. This may have been due to using an older browser, but that’s by-the-by.
Instead I spent twenty-five minutes on the phone, which either ate away my free minutes or cost me a bomb. Boo and hiss.
Look for a report sometime next week on the old switcheroo.
