PowerMac G5 and problems booting...

Writing this up in the hopes it'll help someone else out there. :)

So, I renewed the DeVoeSquared ADC membership in December, and as part of that purchased a new PowerMac G5 for development/testing of the new apps we're working on. Ohhh, what an utterly beautiful peice of engineering the G5 is. The thing that impressed me the most was the fact that there's not a single hanging cable anywhere in the machine. The fans that blow over the CPUs come out on a full assembly, so there's no cables to unplug when you need to remove them to install more RAM... very nice.

The new machine has not been without incident however. Interestingly, from day 1, the machine has had problems with sleeping. It either would go to sleep, then wake up immediately again, or it had problems shutting down. When choosing shut down from the menu (shutdown mind you, NOT restart) it would go through the process of shutting down, then restart again spontaneously! It was very annoying! Furthermore, if I shut the machine down impolitely (by holding the power button for 5 seconds) I would NOT be able to power it up again!! Pressing the power button would do NOTHING! I was beginning to think I was going to have to send the machine back! The only way I could get it to start up again was by unplugging everything from the machine, plugging it all back in, and then, as I plugged items back in, the machine would start up!

So I set out today to diagnose the problem. I started by removing the only two non-factory installed items. Extra RAM I bought from Crucial Technologies and an extra 230GB hard disk I bought from somewhere else.

Booting still didn't work normally with these items removed. But I made an interesting observation. The machine seemed to start when I plugged in my monitor!

Small related segway here...

As much as I would love to purchase one of those beautiful 30 inch cinema displays for this machine. I just can't justify the $3000 pricetag. So when I purchased this machine, my plan was to pull an old Mag monitor I had, out of storage. It's a pretty decent 17 inch Mag. I've had it for probably 6 or 7 years and as monitors go, I'm pretty pleased it's lasted so long. It's been sitting unused for about the last 2-3 years. So it's probably still got another couple years of use left in it.

Well, as it turns out... it is this monitor that is causing the problem! You know how when you press the power button on those sexy cinema displays at the Apple Store it puts the whole machine to sleep? Well, it appears that this monitor also puts a signal on the same line that's being used for that by Apple. The end result is, as long as this monitor is on and plugged into the machine, the machine will not power off. Only by turning off the monitor and pressing the power on the PowerMac can I get the machine to actually shut down!

Annoying? Yes... but something I can live with. Eventually I'll replace the monitor, but until then, at least I have a workaround.