My 8 year old Mac G4 crashed last night and refused to reboot. Took all normally recovery measures (resetting PRAM, etc) and still no go. Took every removable component off and still no go. Power supply measured correct voltages. Was suspicious of motherboard/CPU. re-seated everything else that I could get at (including CPU daughter card). Still no go.

At this point, I was considering next steps – what computer to replace it with and how to move contents of hard drives forward, when I discovered an obscure way to reset open-firmware (which handles booting the machine) on Apples web site. It did the trick and I’m back in business. I’m a bit surprised that I didn’t break anything, giving all the fiddling that I did.

Now to figure out what I was doing, when it crashed…