Resolved No bong sound on iMac G4

[Goldfish64]

So I recently got an iMac G4 and it will not play the bong sound on startup. I've replaced the PRAM battery and reset it and still no bong. When booted into OS X the sound works fine and the volume is all the way up. I have also tried external speakers to no avail.

Any suggestions?

 

[CooperBox]

Go to the top tool-bar. Select the Apple logo and 'System Preferences' from the drop-down box. Then select the 'Sound' icon. You'll then probably see that the 'Alert Volume' is all the way to the left, and probably the 'Play user interface sound effects' has been unchecked. Check the latter box, and move the 'Alert Volume' slider to midway position.
On reboot, you should now hear the gong sound.
The other possibility is that there is an app installed which disables the boot sound (on Leopard and upwards). Believe it was called StartupSound. I guess all it did was the same as described above.

 

[Goldfish64]

All the sound levels are already at the max. I installed StartupSound and set it to the max as well, which didn't work. I also reset the PMU, but that did not work either.

 

[jbarley]

.

 

[Intell]

In System Profiler, does it say Power On Self-Test: Passed under Diagnostics? Try resetting the PRAM as well.

 

[Goldfish64]

In System Profiler, does it say Power On Self-Test: Passed under Diagnostics? Try resetting the PRAM as well.

Actually it does not. It says it has failed. I completely forgot that the whole point of the bong is to say that the machine has passed POST. It says the failure is caused by memory module 0. Now is that the one on bottom (the SO-DIMM module) or the one inside the dome (the DIMM module)?

EDIT: I pulled the bottom SO-DIMM module out and the machine bongs now. I also noticed that the machine was only seeing 256 MB instead of 512 MB on that stick.

 

[Intell]

Excellent, happy to know you resolved the problem.

 

[Goldfish64]

Excellent, happy to know you resolved the problem.

So it looks like the issue was caused by a faulty memory module. Thanks for the help.