# Gray/Black Screen of Death & OS install issues



## ThePunisher (Jun 1, 2007)

I have a 800MHz G4 gooseneck iMac that keeps giving a grey/black screen of death. The computer was taking a significantly longer period of time to start up than usual and, once it would, opening an application, such as Firefox, would cause it to bounce in the dock once or twice before crashing. After one or two applications crashed, the next one tended to bring up the screen of death, prompting me to restart my Mac.

Never having ever had to actually deal with this sort of thing, I decided to reinstall the OS (10.4) with a clean install. During the first stage of installation, however, the install failed and prompted me to restart the Mac and try again. The second time, it got as far as preparing the disk for installation, after which it simply booted me back to the initial language selection screen.

Because the install was only partially completed, starting up the Mac without a startup disk brings up an expected flashing question mark folder.

Any help or insight that you guys could give me would be thoroughly appreciated.

UPDATE: Skimming through the system profile to see if defective hardware might be to blame I noticed that my Airport card wasn't being detected. Could this contribute to the problem, or is it irrelevant, as the card isn't necessary to the core operations of the computer?


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

As Airport being the problem, I doubt it, but with hardware it is always an issue. Another thing to remember is if the drivers aren't there, it may not see it either. I one time worked on a Mac Pro that didn't see a new Airport card that was just installed until the OS was updated. But by judging from your problem, I'd be more likely to say that RAM has gone bad on you, or the motherboard is going. You Imac should have come with a Hardware Test CD that you can boot from. I'd load that and run the hardware tests to see if any codes come up.


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