When you are bleeding the system with the engine stopped ,you are pumping the brake pedal and fighting against the resistance of the vacuum chamber spring and you are not getting full pedal motion when bleeding.When you start the engine ,the vacuum created by the engine overcomes the spring force and allows the brake pedal to compress the brake piston itself and show the real position of the master cylinder piston.Start the engine while bleeding the brakes.
Check for leaks sounds like when pressure goes up u are loosing fluid some where, also check vacuum line to booster hope this helps
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Depends if you actually lose all the pedal to a point where you cannot brake at all when you turn on the engine. Cause since there are power brakes on those models, it is normal for the brake pedal to become hard as rock when engine is off, and becoming alot softer when the engine runs. Its made that way so thay you have a minimum braking power if the engine stalls while operating the vehicule. If you do lose all braking power when turning the car on to the point where the car keeps moving on idle with the brakes fully on, or close to that, then you probably stll have some air in the hoses and need to bleed the system some more. For some reason i always had more problems bleeding GM brakes on all the cars i had. Guess it's just bad engineering in those years, most 1990 to about 1997-98 GMs had the worst problems ever... And finally the only other thing possible if all else fails is the ABS system, although not all saturns came stock with those in those years, so if you don't have any ABS then one of the parts you changed is defective or still air in the system, and if you do have ABS then probably that the ABS pump is malfunctionning, although usually it lights up the ABS signal in your dash's instrument cluster.
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