[SOLVED] Told to restart my G4 as soon as I turn it on?

I have a Desktop G4 mirror door drive Firewire 800 Powermac. It has 2 gb of RAM and a 1.42 gig processor. I am running the last version of Tiger.

I press the power button, I hear the chime, my display appears as normal. Then after about 3 seconds I get the dreaded white writing telling me that I need to restart.

My mouse and keybord are completely unresponsive, so I have to turn it off and then back on again to restart. This does nothing and I end up in the same situation.

I have tried resetting my PRAM, and I have tried using the various other key commands recommended on startup to deal with such issues, but as I've said, my mouse and keyboard are frozen so nothing works. I can't use single user mode or anything.

Any ideas,?

Thanks.

You should look into resetting the "PMU": http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=95037

OK I've tried that, but the problem still remains, thank you though.

Having done a little googling on the subject, I think the most likely cause is that I'm having a 'Kernal Panic'.

Does anyone know the best way to deal with these, particularly when your mouse and keyboard are completely frozen?

A kernel (with e) panic is when something is so wrong that the kernel (the main component in the UNIX subsystem) meets some problem so dramatic that it is unable to find a way to recover and then HALTS your system to avoid damage to the data on the disk.

You might actually have a defective memory chip, unseated cable between harddrive and disk, defective disk or something. The CPU should be fine, so I think it's something less dramatic but major enough.

I would look at the RAM chips too. Try to "reseat" them? Take them out and put them back in? Try to remove one or swap them around?

OK Progress, I've removed some of my RAM and hey presto, my computer has started up.

Strange thing is the offending DIMM card doesn't seem to be one of my newer ones, it appears to be one that I installed roughly three years ago.

I appear to be now having trouble with my airport connection though, although that's probably something silly. I'll work it out I'm sure.

Just glad to have my Mac back, thank you very much for your help.

You are welcome. Feel free to close the thread if you feel this solved the problem.