Today, Steve (one of my co-workers at CyberMedics moved his eMac from home down to the store. It's a G4 700 Mhz system, not the latest eMac, but still a nice little machine, and quite speedy when booting into Mac OS X 10.4.
The only issue is that this beautiful, although, oddly designed:
system kept booting into Open Firmware (Windows users, think BIOS). Occasionally, the eMac, wouldn't even boot up! He was not in the greatest mood over it, especially since recently the system was functioning normally.
So, since the issue of the eMac booting into Open Firmware at each power on is a symptom of bad memory, he decided to take the back side of the shell off and take a look at the innards, revealing an image similar to this:
Needless to say, doing a minor memory adjustment is not cool on an eMac, but it needed to be checked. As Steve was tinkering with the eMac, he found what was really causing the trouble: a small part on the back of the power button had broken off, leaving the eMac thinking that the power button was being held down each time the unit was powered on. The part requires soldering, but is way too small for our utilities at CMC, so Steve is just going ahead and ordering a new power button. But man, was that eMac ever troublesome!
2 comments:
To power it on. All you need to do is take a wire (like a wire bread tie) and place it on the red and black wire leads on the connector. (The best place I found was not in trying to shove it into the connector but the metal leads on the top of the connector. It bridges the two and you now have hot wired your computer.
Congrat's and have fun. ;)
A good suggestion. I think Steve ended up using something similar until the replacement power button arrived.
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