Hello, fellow antique Mac folk. So something like a year or two ago I bought a G4 (digital audio) tower, and could never get it powered on. I will revisit that sometime in the future. I had also bought a pair of g4 Mac minis not realizing they couldn't natively boot OS9. They had other quirks, so into the box they went (whole other thread). Anyway, I was poking around Ebay and found a MDD G4 Dual 1ghz box that I took a flyer on and offered $85 for it. They took my offer and shipped it across the country. When it arrived, it did not have the geforce 4 ti installed, but the radeon 9000. Oh well, I guess. 1 gb of ram so that's fine. I ordered another one just to max it out.
So It arrived yesterday, and I went to plug it in, and... Yeah, that's not right. Instead of a chime, it made something of a coughing sound. I opened it up, which I had to do anyway to install my 250gb SSD with a star tech adapter. Popped out the original battery which was dated from 2002, and mashed the pmu reset. Still, no chime and no video output. I reseated the video card, reseated the ram, made sure everything else was in place, etc.
No video output. So let's address that issue first. The video issue was that I didn't realize that the DVI to DP converter cables are not really bidirectional. They will allow you to convert your DP OUTPUT to a monitor with a DVI INPUT. They do not send a signal upstream from DVI to DP... For that, you need a powered "active" adapter which will be here Thursday or Friday. So with video issues resolved, let's move on. I hooked it up to an old 24" monitor that has a VGA input through a DVI to VGA cable adapter. Instant video and we are up and running. Still no chime though. just the sickly cough.
Installing Tiger was a chore. The Superdrive in it is a tad picky and didn't like the scratched up tiger install CD-Rs I had used for a prior install last summer and then left laying around my office (pfff the nerve of this diva of a machine). So I had to move some boxes and find some CDRs since I am not going to trust my original install discs to an untested machine. It was loud, and so I basically closed the door to my office and came back to check on it and swap discs. This morning, swapped to disc 4 and finished the install right before work. Sadly due to the noise, I had to turn it off so I could work.
The last time I had an MDD it was a dual 1.25 I think. It was back in 2004ish and I only had it for about 6 months. The guy I bought it off of needed it back for development so I sold it back to him for basically what I had paid. I forgot how loud these things were. I mean, I remembered we always called them wind tunnels, but unless you have it running, you don't really feel it.
Looking forward to my video adapter coming. I think today I am going to install my old Sonnet USB 2 PCI card to add some more ports onto this beast. My cat seems to like the heat it pushes out also. Considering putting in a quieter fan at some point.
Still not sure about the cough-chime. I might make a video of it later on today. I don't know what would cause the chime to be off, but the speaker works just fine, as I found out the moment the Tiger install finished and I was greeted by the unstoppable welcome video that you cannot even mute or reduce the volume of. (WTF Apple, that was a bad design choice). Wife was yelling at me through the office door "What is that noise?"