How come no fw boot w/dead PB 12" hard drive?

[California]

I have two external firewire drives, both with Tiger on them; both drives were from other machines. One drive was from a Tibook, now in an external case, the other was the original 20gig iMac g3 drive from my mom's computer. That desktop drive has an external powersource, while the Tibook laptop drive only has the firewire cord.

I've got a friends 867mhz 12" PB that I can't get to boot. Grey screen spinning rotating thingie only. i have fsck'ed, pramed, pmu'ed I think.

The only interesting thing I got was one long tone when I held down the power button for more than a few seconds. The tone and then the sleep light flashed.

Is the logic board gone as well? All I'm getting is the tiger install screen off the two external drives, no actual Tiger start up. What am I doing wrong?

 

[mad jew]

Okay, how did the PowerBook die? Did it just suddenly not boot one day or was it behaving strangely for a little while before it eventuated into this?

Also, can you use these external drives to boot other Macs? In other words, do you know for sure that they're capable of booting up a Mac?

Have you tried taking out third party RAM from the PowerBook? I'm guessing it won't boot from the OSX disc, but does it show any response?

At this stage it looks like a failed logic board and/or power supply. Hopefully I'm wrong though.

 

[California]

Okay, how did the PowerBook die? Did it just suddenly not boot one day or was it behaving strangely for a little while before it eventuated into this?

Also, can you use these external drives to boot other Macs? In other words, do you know for sure that they're capable of booting up a Mac?

Have you tried taking out third party RAM from the PowerBook? I'm guessing it won't boot from the OSX disc, but does it show any response?

At this stage it looks like a failed logic board and/or power supply. Hopefully I'm wrong though.

It died a slow hard drive death.

I'll try to boot from the other drives -- but up all night and now going to bed!

I'll try to take out the ram. I did put some known good ram into the pb, took out the 128 oem stick. That only leaves 128mbs in there, this is the 867mhz machine.

that would be a double whammy if both the board and hd were dead. I'll post results later. Frustrating that all I'm getting is the gray screen and no firewire boot.

 

[mad jew]

Okay, re-read your original post and somehow I missed the grey screen comment before. Ignore the RAM and logic board comments at this stage, but try and boot from the externals and also the OSX discs if possible. Good luck.

 

[CanadaRAM]

More to the point, does it boot from the OSX CD?

The OS's on the externals, being installed from other machines, may not be bootable on the PB 12". If you can boot from the OSX CD you can then either - recover data or update the OS on the external to make it bootable.

 

[California]

Okay, re-read your original post and somehow I missed the grey screen comment before. Ignore the RAM and logic board comments at this stage, but try and boot from the externals and also the OSX discs if possible. Good luck.

thanks mj, I was kinda hoping you'd be up and on the boards today. I can boot from OS Tiger cd but it wants to install on something. I did manage to "install" on "dead" hard drive but it won't boot from the original hd. I just won't boot. I wonder if it is a ram issue somehow. I'm going to look at that ram again... it didn't look like it was sitting right when I took out the original ram. But it registered the new 1gig in there, so I don't know what's up.

Oh, thsi is a French Powerbook. French keyboard. I wonder if this means anything?

 

[mad jew]

So you can boot from the OSX discs but not from the internal hard drive. You've run fsck, what sort of result did you get? Did it make any corrections? Did it come back with a positive result?

I think an Archive & Install, if possible, may be the simplest next step assuming fsck says everything's fine.

FWIW, I don't think the French connection matters.

 

[California]

So you can boot from the OSX discs but not from the internal hard drive. You've run fsck, what sort of result did you get? Did it make any corrections? Did it come back with a positive result?

I think an Archive & Install, if possible, may be the simplest next step assuming fsck says everything's fine.

FWIW, I don't think the French connection matters.

Thanks MJ and everyone. What I was doing wrong was skipping the "check install dvd" step when I needed to reinstall Tiger on external hard drive.

It works perfectly. I'll say it again, this little baby at 867mhz seems as fast as my 1.5ghz 12" pb and screen is just as bright. Great machine.

Only funny thing is it is configured for English on keyboard but it is a French keyabord. Works in English, just have to remember where things are in English!

 

[mad jew]

Good to hear it's working again. By the way, you can change the input menu layout in the International pane of System Preferences, if that helps.