I'm afraid that my old Mac Mini G4 1.5GHz is slowly dying. It takes multiple attempts to make it boot to MOS 3.9. It makes a low tone beep and it doesn't boot.

I have managed to boot up a couple of times after several attempts. This gave me the opportunity to back up my Work partition and the most important configuration files in SYS.

Tomorrow (here in California), I will install MOS in a backup Mac Mini G4, silent update too; in fact exactly the same specs of the old one. I hope someone at support is around these days to help me to transfer my MOS key :)

After the holidays, I will bring my old Mac Mini to an Apple shop to see if it can be salvaged.

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My bet is that they'll roll their eyes and say something like: "Man, this product is no longer supported, why don't you buy yourself a shiny new intel Mini?".

Maybe the harddrive is failing? Swap it from the other machine and you'll find out.

And there's always the "bake the mobo" option if everything else fails.

Try another power supply unit.

My bet is also either the HDD or power supply. I would suggest that you try to find someone who is good at hardware in general and with soldering stuff. If there is something in the machine they might be able to fix it.

If I've learned one thing about Amigas, then it is that almost every hardware problem can be fixed.

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I tried another power supply, but I still get the low tone beeps. I guess it may be the HDD.

I will prepare my spare Mac Mini with MOS and try to replace the HDD of the old one. If that was the problem, I will keep the old computer as my spare for the next time the "mud" hits the fan.

If you're not already familiar with a tear-down guide for the MacMini - https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Mac_mini_%28PowerPC%29

Also, the only other easily replaceable part that could be at fault is the memory.

I've been sniffing around the Haiku-OS build guides for ARM and PPC and noticed a comment about poor reliability for Apple PPC. My initial thought was that might be true for some G5 systems but, from my experience, seemed to overstate the extent of the problem for G4. I'm curious to know what others think of the quality and reliability of Apple PPC.

https://www.haiku-os.org/guides/building/compiling-powerpc

Kudos to the Morphos Team for the quick turnaround to transfer my Morphos key. Less than 24 hours since I requested it.

Now I'm almost done transferring files from my back up. It will be a Happy Christmas after all :)