[MLUG] Now less urgent hardware problem...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Thanks for the many helpful suggestions which I will certainly strive
to check out concerning my non-booting dual G4.  Interestingly enough,
my butt (and my butt head) got saved once again by the miraculous
intervention of target disk mode.  YES!  I'm copying every last
freaking user file off the not-very-happy Powermac onto the
eager-to-please eMac as we speak!  No muss, no fuss, no messing around
with cables.  This should have been the second thing I tried.  Oh
well...

(What is target disk mode?  Modern Macs can boot into firewire
driveness if you press "T" while booting even when they're only
semi-functional, which makes file recovery and transfer about 50
million times easier than it used to be.  Evidently, Windows XP may
have something similar, but possibly not quite as smooth.

OK, so I think my success here and other stuff rules out:

video card failure (yeah, some macs won't boot if this doesn't work,
but I have video)
hard drive failure (working fine now)
power supply failure (shouldn't be able to spin the drive this well, right?)
?controller failure (I can use the hard drive as a firewire device, so
I'm guessing the controller is okay?

I'm not sure what else, though.  Target disk mode is apparently quite
low level, so it might be that I still have some serious logic board
problem.  Or it might just be that the mac is confused about what it's
proper boot device is.  I guess I can run a drive utility on it to see
if that's an issue.  (Now how that would get messed up...I'm not
really sure.  Especially the part where it doesn't boot from CD.)

In any case, target disk mode saved me.  I only lost 5 hours (oog).

jking
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