iBook booting problem... looking for advice.

WheresMyCamera?

Hi.

Looking for a bit of help fixing a problem with my Dad's iBook. He's got the 12' G4 1.33 model and if memory serves it's got 10.4.11 running. As of last night it's not booting up. When I turn it on its responds by sounding the start up chime, I also hear fan or drive noise. It gets as far as the gray screen with the darker gray apple logo on it and stays that way with the little "working circle/icon" revolving.

I've been on to the apple support site and done the following:

Reset the PRAM and NVRAM
Reset the PMU

We don't have the original install/restore disc's as this machine was bought 2nd hand a number of years ago so can't try to install/restore from the disc.

Any ideas on what to try next??

muggyog

Startup in single user mode ( hold 'apple' and 'S' during power up till you see text on screen ). Follow the instructions on the screen to do a disk check i.e. type sbin/fsck -f and see does it repair anything/ give errors. If you get errors note them and get back to us.

WheresMyCamera?

Thanks Muggyog for the info. I'd already gotten on to trying that after I posted the above post. Tried typing in fsck -fy, nothing really helped there. Ended up getting a disk03 I/O error.
Tried all the fixes I could find online for that. Everything pointed to a knackered HD. Ended up finding some OS X software I had bought a while ago o tried booting from there. To no avail so ended up erasing and re-installing the OS.
Now the machine is running 10.5.8 and is as up to date as it can be. Pretty happy with myself figuring it all out.
Although it still has dreadful battery life, works for my Da though, til he gets an iPad anyway.

nialler

sounds like a HD failure, IO errors are generally bad, there's a couple of ways you can deal with it, buy an original leopard/tiger install disk (non grey has to be retail version) from ebay or apple if you can get it, use disk utility from the retail disk or diskwarrior and try resurrect to an external HD to get your data back, replace the HD and reclone.

You could also start it up in target disk mode (apple-T or just T can't be sure at this late hour) and see if the disk mounts on another mac and back up data that way, all of the above is assuming that they have stuff on it that they want back.

Last option, replacing the HD takes about an hour, various instructions online if your handy with a torx screwdriver and not afraid to pull apart a laptop, you'll still need install discs, call apple see if they can supply.

N

muggyog

Thought you dident have any install disks? I would be very suspicious of that HD. Just like death being natures way of telling you to slow down, HD's dont get better with age. Think you should change it by following instructions here.

WheresMyCamera?

I thought I didn't have any disks, turns out I had a copy of Leopard (retail version) from when I updated an iMac. Didn't have any of the original gray disks though.

The iBook is used by my Dad for browsing the net and thats it. He keeps anything of importants on an external drive, which isn't alot anyway.

He just wants a tie over til he gets an iPad in a few weeks.