Hi,

I have a lot of experience working with PCs, but I'm new to the world of Macs. A friend gave me a used PowerMac G4 after the hard drive on it broke down. My plan is to put a new hard drive in and install OS X.

When I first turned it on, I got the error with the folder and the question mark, which apparently means it can't find anywhere to boot from. This was expected, since it doesn't have any hard drive in it.

I opened it up to put a 30 gig IDE hard drive in. The first time I plugged in the hard drive the Mac still turned on and displayed the folder and question mark, which I expected since I have not yet installed Mac OS X on the drive.

But then I moved the hard drive to a different IDE connector, closed the case, and when I tried to turn the Mac on again, nothing happened. The fan on the power supply will turn on, and the light on the DVD drive will blink, but that's it. The hard drive won't turn on, and nothing appears on the screen. The scariest part is that the power light doesn't even turn on, except when I press down on it, but as soon as I let go of the power button it turns off again.

I have no idea what happened, except that maybe I accidently short circuited something on the motherboard. I already tried removing the hard drive, and the Mac still won't turn on. I tried pressing the reset button on the motherboard, but it still won't turn on.

Any ideas on what I should do?

When you reset the PRAM did you have the power cable unplugged? If not this could give you some problems. Also, your PRAM battery could be dead. This will cause problems to no end.

The first time I tried pressing the button on the motherboard, I had the power cord unplugged. That didn't seem to fix the problem, so I tried pressing the button again with the power cord plugged in and the machine turned on. Apparently that was a bad idea.

Do you think getting a new PRAM battery could fix the problem?

Make shure the memory sticks are setted and you did not knock one lose.