Matthew Knott

I recently faced a conundrum after upgrading the memory on my old iMac G5.

After the upgrade, I was greeted by silence. A quick check in Leopards preferences indicated that there was no audio hardware present, a check in Apple System Profiler confirmed the same.

My first thought was that I'd knocked a card or cable while inserting the DIMM. A search online indicated that this was a real posibility. I was dreading pulling the plastic monster apart.

Before breaking out the toolkit, I thought I'd take a chance on an old friend, Apple + Alt + P + R.

I'd dabbled with macs on / off for the last 10 years or so, and you pick up a few trick, resetting the pram and the vram, rebuilding the desktop etc. Since my g3 iBook I can't recall ever using those tricks.

With nothing to lose I booted up holding down those four keys and on the second boot, chimes! I was a bit surprised it worked, and puzzled as to why it worked but I'm glad it did.

Tags: Apple Mac No Sound Upgrade Memory Failure Silent Macintosh OSX Leopard