G4 Mirror door hell

[Brooklynite]

I just got a G4 dual 1.25 mirror door loaded with 4 internal drives and and HD 3 system with SCSI card. Basically, maxed out. It works fine until i try to add my firewire peripherals and it will not see any of them. (drives and firwire DV bridge) It seems that the power supply does not have enough juice to mount them. Take out the PCI cards and the drives show up no problem.

Upon sending it back to the store, the machine tests out fine, (as expected) but that's without the PCI cards. They're telling me that they would replace the power supply with the same kind which would not eliminate the problem. Sucks to be me! This was the best machine I could buy that would allow me to run OS 9 and OSX allowing for a smooth transition to OSX while giving me a significant power increase from my old system. Any advice?

Thanks,

Eric

[ronwasserman]

Unfortunately the G4 Mirror door models were total crap. You do know this computer was nick named the 'wind tunnel'. This computer also runs really really really hot so keep a close eye on the HD card(s).

You can get more info on problems here: http://www.g4noise.com/

Hope this helps.

RW

[lagasus]

Why don't you try removing the extra internal drives that you added to see if that helps. Then start putting them back in one by one to see what the tolerance of your G4 is power-wise.

[Brooklynite]

Thanks a lot. I do know that the first run of these machines had a known power supply issue which caused significant fan noise, and that Apple automatically sent all registered users a new power supply upon registering the computer, but this is a third run of the mirror door machine where supposedly the fan problem has been fixed. Damn you Steve Jobs! Damn you! Luckily, I leased this machine and I might be able to upgrade the lease to a G5, but that doesn't give me OS9 to fall back on when I encounter the inevitable OSX acclimation problems and need to get work done. Plus it means ditching my SCSI card and drives. They're less then 2 years old. Not the route I was hopeing to take.

Meh

[Brooklynite]

Yeah, I could do that. It's a trade off, I guess. It was very appealing to have two giant internal storage drives and OS9 and OSX on their own drives. (That's 4 internal drives.) I'd hate to give that up, but it seems like a viable solution. Mmmmmmm terabytes!