hairline trace crack?
 

possibly a good-enough explanation - always the detective i'd love to pinpoint that trace though... the techie/artist called this morning; a new boot from overnight shutdown worked fine-ish. he did end up having one problem, typical for the glut of problems this g4 has generated these weeks: after the first start this morning, the screen slept, and he couldn't wake it. usb freeze? who knows - there have been usb freezes among the rest of it. sounds more central than the graphics card. what he had done is put in another AGP-graphics card (not identical with the original). he wants me to take it home and run it with the digidesign cards as a test. thanks for the suggestion!
exdc

update on mdd g4 cold start weirdness
 

The G4's still at our brave local ASP. Not having a ready supply of logic boards has erected a hurdle, since so far everything but switching a new logic board (or a new dual processor) has been tried with no success, and - maddeningly - MacTest Pro hurtles along, insistently returning a clean bill of health. Apple apparently hits them up for a re-stocking fee if they need to return a new logic board they ordered but turn out not to need, but the ASP is going to request a special dispensation today. The drives and the pci cards (Digidesign Mix Plus) have been throughly tested by them in another MDD with absolutely no problems. Still at square one. Oh btw: a different video card made no difference with regard to the weirdness described at the beginning of this thread.

g4 blues
 

just gets worser and worser.
picked it up, third time running, this afternoon.
had last week neglected to provide the technician at the asp my logic and protools keys, we figured what the hell, he had some diagnoses (see below) so while he ran digidesign's digitest on the mix cards with no problems (transmission problem of course, but expected, since no interfaces), he never actually could start and check either logic pro or protools to see what happens when they access the cards in those two pci-slots. anyhow, once i got it back home, it took about ten minutes to get the first kernel panic. to summarize: both logic pro and pro tools elicit kernel panics. nothing else appears to be broken. digidesign insists the cards have passed their diagnostic software (digitest) and are thus completely clean. they work fine in another machine. what remains? is this a pci slot problem? i'm pretty soon into this for more money that i care to divulge, and it's still broken. isn't there some kind of system whereby an authentic asp can get the kind of support required to figure even this kind of sh_t out? His MacTest Pro ($1400 USD) showed no hardware faults after many many many iterations. Still the machine kernel panicked. Only when he put in a new dual processor and a new graphics card was it possible to run more or less everything - notable exception of the two apps i got the machine for (logic pro and pro tools). does anybody have any new ideas?
exdc

final installment hehe
 

OK, here we go. What fixed it? Yes, it's fixed. How - "don't ask me"? OK, that's uncool, considering all the great ideas that showed up here. The G4 has been put so thoroughly through its paces now, and the results tonight were so spectacular, that the bottom line must be: the technician fixed it. And why did the Digi gear still not want to play along? I suspect the answer is that formatting with complete zeroing, reinstallation of system software, on this particular drive for the fourth time, reinstallation of Pro Tools, both on the OS 9 partition and the OS X partition (of that more thoroughly expunged drive), updating of all relevant items (system to 10.3.4 = highest Digi-approved; PT to 6.4.1 = highest Digi produced for the Mix cards; Logic to 7.1.1). Before a couple of the updates on the OS X side (including Pro App Support 3.1), the OS 9 (9.2.2 of the system) version of PT accessed the Mix cards perfectly, while the OS X version still caused kernel panics. Now after a few more updates these are all gone. Oddly, these updates had been performed on every re-installation detailed above. Go figure. The take-home-message is: enough is not enough, maybe one more time is...
exdc
PS - if it's broken again tomorrow, you'll read about it here...
:eek: :) :rolleyes: :cool: :p ;) :D

That's quite a story. Mine is eerily similar, right down to the hardware part-diagnosis but without the expert-techie involvement. I'm intrigued - if you're still around - whether you're still using the G4 now, the OS version you settled on, etc or whether the whole kit met an infortunate accident which mine is definitely begging for... I'm currently back to 10.3.6, the most stable Panther release I can use. 10.3.9 was the start of my problems and - probably - the best way to fix them (more recent updates, etc) - or did you find peace with 10.4? This is where I stand now: spot for 10.4 or cut my (considerable) losses.

Or maybe it's just the PRAM battery...

IME, I have had similiar problems with a loose processor card. Simply reseating it fixes the issue, maybe that is all that the technician did.