I intended to spend my 4-day break fixing my home music studio, which has been experiencing various malfunctions. In August, my faithful G5 PowerMac suddenly couldn’t start up. I tried everything suggested in the help forums (Apple and unofficial) and mailing lists, to no avail.
Pulling out the power plug and leaving it for days and trying to start it again, didn’t work. Opening up the casing and removing the RAM and putting them back in, also didn’t work. I was going to send it to an Apple service centre during this break. My PowerMac was lying dejectedly in my music studio for several weeks.
I decided to give it one more try before I lugged it down the stairs. I plugged in the power and suddenly, there was a familiar startup whirr! I hurriedly re-connected the monitor and the screen eventually lit up with the Apple login! I was so happy!
After I reset the time and reconnected various cables, I realised however that my 2nd audio card (doubling up as a MIDI card) was no longer detected. And the Airport still wasn’t working as of last year when I upgraded to Leopard (separate issue). After reboots the audio card was detected and audio output worked fine. [Techtool Deluxe](http://support.apple.com/techtooldeluxe) detected an error in my file structure that couldn’t be fixed, possibly as my original hard drive is nearly full. I installed a second internal hard drive a few months ago to handle the extra data load. Plus, I ran Time Machine.
Lastly, I rebooted in [Safe mode](http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393) which is [supposed to fix that darned Airport problem](http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1723?viewlocale=en_US) after upgrading to Leopard, but it didn’t work. All it did was make my fans churn so violently that I thought my PowerMac would explode.
Anyway … the important features were working. It was time to make music again! I switched on my [KORG Trition Extreme](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korg_Triton#Extreme) which was just serviced several weeks ago…
And the darned keyboard wouldn’t turn on. I switched power cables and the other keyboard still worked, but the Triton wouldn’t start. I heard a spzzzt! sound everytime I tried to turn it on. Sounded like the internal power unit died as well. So I sent it to City Music yesterday for repairs, reminding them that I had recently sent it to them for servicing. The two salesmen on duty commented that the Triton rarely has problems as it’s quite sturdy.
So is there a bug travelling around my music studio, or what? I’ve had both PowerMac and Triton for over 4 years, and never before have they failed to turn on, until this year. Both times it happened after I hadn’t touched the equipment for a while. Maybe they’re feeling neglected. Or feeling old and obsolete.
So basically I haven’t totally achieved my objective of making music during this break, although the trusty old piano is still around so I’ve been revising my jazz pieces instead. Now that’s the type of music equipment that won’t have startup problems.