Just a quick success story. I picked up a PowerMac G4 MDD 1.25-DP to have as my multipurpose vintage machine. It is the fastest PPC machine I've ever had. But I was a poor student when G4s and G5s were current so they were well out of my price range back then. I kept an Apple laptop, but ended up migrating to PC for my desktop.
I bought the MDD semi-local on eBay for a decent price, listed with no hard drive, does not boot. I was hoping all it needed was a drive. When I attempted to power it on, it would only make noise for a second or so, or it would only click. After poking around it for a minute, it actually powered up! I got it set up with a StarTech IDE to SATA adapter, installed OSes, and so on. It worked for a couple days, but then went back to only clicking.
I built an ATX adapter harness out of a StarTech ATX extension cable, and fought with that for a while because I accidentally omitted one pin. It seemed to boot, but I was getting no display. Seemed like maybe an issue with the ADC card with an ATX supply. But when I got my hands on a couple of my other graphics cards (non-ADC from a Sawtooth and a PCI card from a B&W), I found that those did not work either. Eventually I found my problem with the harness and everything is working again.
In the meantime I was assuming that recapping the power supply would let me work with ADC cards again, so I ordered all the caps from DigiKey. After finding my problem with the ATX setup I had renewed confidence that the machine was actually still good, there wasn't some other problem that was causing the power and display issues. So I sat down and recapped the power supply. It took me over four hours to do, but it was a success. I have a working MDD and I can actually close the case again.
Now what should I do with it?
I bought the MDD semi-local on eBay for a decent price, listed with no hard drive, does not boot. I was hoping all it needed was a drive. When I attempted to power it on, it would only make noise for a second or so, or it would only click. After poking around it for a minute, it actually powered up! I got it set up with a StarTech IDE to SATA adapter, installed OSes, and so on. It worked for a couple days, but then went back to only clicking.
I built an ATX adapter harness out of a StarTech ATX extension cable, and fought with that for a while because I accidentally omitted one pin. It seemed to boot, but I was getting no display. Seemed like maybe an issue with the ADC card with an ATX supply. But when I got my hands on a couple of my other graphics cards (non-ADC from a Sawtooth and a PCI card from a B&W), I found that those did not work either. Eventually I found my problem with the harness and everything is working again.
In the meantime I was assuming that recapping the power supply would let me work with ADC cards again, so I ordered all the caps from DigiKey. After finding my problem with the ATX setup I had renewed confidence that the machine was actually still good, there wasn't some other problem that was causing the power and display issues. So I sat down and recapped the power supply. It took me over four hours to do, but it was a success. I have a working MDD and I can actually close the case again.
Now what should I do with it?