I don’t often turn off my Power Mac G5, letting it sleep between use instead.  However I had reason to restart it the other day and upon powering up the system wouldn’t boot, it simply sat at the blue screen, stuck and made no further progress.

I couldn’t remember the last time I had restarted the machine so it was difficult to pinpoint any changes I might have made that were causing the problem.  After looking around on line and finding no answers that solved the issue it suddenly occurred to me I’d recently swapped out my USB 2 external drive that I had used for Time Machine for a Firewire version.

A quick flick of the power switch on the Maxtor One Touch drive to turn it off and hey presto the Power Mac immediately continued its boot process.  I then tried some reboots with the external drive switched on and off and the problem repeated itself every time the drive was on.

Presumably the Power Mac is trying to boot from the Firewire drive which will obviously fail, why it’s trying to do that I don’t know, that’s the next problem to solve.