Cube stuck on Boot Screen (takes 15 minutes to get there)

[EmilioCube]

When I try powering on my Cube, it chimes and after ~1 minute, the Apple logo appears and the circle spins. Until now it just seemed like a normal, but slow boot, but the Cube stays at that screen for 15 minutes, then the screen turns blue and the white box with Apple logo and "appears but the bar stays white and nothing happens. After 5 minutes, the rainbow ball of death replaces the cursor and even one hour later nothing changes.
Booting from the original Tiger 10.4.3 DVD still goes around 2 minutes, so ist is as "fast" as normal.
Is anybody familiar with this behaviour?

 

[AlumaMac]

Have you tried booting into Safe Mode (hold shift on boot)? If it boots normally than could just need a system re-install. Otherwise could be HD failing/bad blocks.

 

[TheShortTimer]

Otherwise could be HD failing/bad blocks.

From what's shown in their signature, the OP is using an SSD.

 

[DearthnVader]

When I try powering on my Cube, it chimes and after ~1 minute, the Apple logo appears and the circle spins. Until now it just seemed like a normal, but slow boot, but the Cube stays at that screen for 15 minutes, then the screen turns blue and the white box with Apple logo and "appears but the bar stays white and nothing happens. After 5 minutes, the rainbow ball of death replaces the cursor and even one hour later nothing changes.
Booting from the original Tiger 10.4.3 DVD still goes around 2 minutes, so ist is as "fast" as normal.
Is anybody familiar with this behaviour?

Does sound like a failing drive or data corruption.

 

[EmilioCube]

Have you tried booting into Safe Mode (hold shift on boot)? If it boots normally than could just need a system re-install. Otherwise could be HD failing/bad blocks.

Could be, thanks.
I’ll try booting into safe mode.

From what's shown in their signature, the OP is using an SSD.

When my first VRM blew itself up it took pretty much the entire Cube with it (except CD drive and RAM).
I have a second Cube with the same Specs (except this one having a stock HDD) and was too lazy to update my signature as I thought I could resolder the NAND chips from the dead SSD to one of the same working SSDs I had in my house to retain the data. It turned out there are a ton of revisions of them looking externally the same but all using different board layouts and the NANDs are also different so they were incompatible with each other and I just forgot updating my signature.

When the VRM of this Cube failed a few weeks ago, my 6200 died so I supposed the 12V string failed. I just didn’t thought that the HDD (which uses the 12V string as well) was damaged as it still spinned.

Long story short, it seems like I have no SSD nor HDD with a working MacOS on it.

Also, the installer on the DVD does not recognize any HDD or SSD to install MacOS on. I formatted the working SSD to HFS+ but it is still not getting recognized. A 80GB HDD with Windows XP on it (which I don’t need anymore) is also not seen by the installer.

 

[EmilioCube]

Update: I was able to repartition the SSD, but now the Installer says that MacOS can’t boot from this Partition. It is around 64GB big, empty and formatted as MacOS Extended Journaled. Any tips?

 

[ToniCH]

formatted as MacOS Extended Journaled. Any tips?

What partition scheme? For PPC machines it should be Apple Partition Map.

 

[EmilioCube]

I only seem to have these options:



None MacOS Partition System was accepted by the installer CD.

 

[EmilioCube]

This is the error when formatted to MacOS EJ (in English now):

 

[EmilioCube]

Well, I just reformatted the SSD and it seems to accept all three partitions now. No idea what was wrong before formatting it. Thanks for the help.

 

[ToniCH]

I only seem to have these options:
None MacOS Partition System was accepted by the installer CD.

Common partition schemes are: GUID, Master Boot Record and Apple Partition Map.

Normally with newer Mac and Windows machines you would use GUID, with old Windows machines you would use Master boot record, with PPC-machines (like the G4 Cube) the Apple Partition Map.

The options you show are the Format types. Apple Extended, APFS and FAT are such things.

The format type and partition map can usually be chosen independently but you need to pay attention to the partition scheme. You might miss it if you are not looking closely. I remember that once it was difficult to partition a drive using Apple partition map -scheme when I was doing it with some modern Mac OS. Then I used an older machine with older OS version and it was much easier. Cannot remember the details though.