I have an iBook G4 1.33 (A1133) which was gifted to me 10 years ago. I occasionally booted it up to play with it and never had an issue.
I got it out last weekend with plans to upgrade it, ordered upgrades (ram and hdd) but when using it on the Sunday...the $%^& thing died!
What happened? I was fooling in OSX and had Onyx open, cleaning out all the temp files, cache files, etc. There was an option to reset all user permissions (or something like that?) which I selected. Onyx required the machine be rebooted. When I rebooted, I have dual boot and accidentally booted into Lubuntu PPC. Machine was working fine. I rebooted again and selected macos. It booted ok but I got to a screen with a constant rotating timer (animated graphic). I thought maybe it is the user permission thing going on in the background so I left the ibook running at this point, on a charger, in my study.
I checked up on it 2 hours later and it was still going (rotating timer). As I was going to order the new hdd, I wasnt really concerned about data loss on the drive so did a hard shutdown (held powerbutton down) and tried to start it again. Unfortunately it didnt power up this time
The symptons I get are;
Power on - Chimes,drives start up like they are wanting to boot, no display, No fan. Stays like this forever...there is no display. I have disconnected the hdd and dvd drive and no change.
Holding power down at startup - chime, fan starts up, long beep, 10 flashes of sleep light, chime (as per normal startup above)
When powered up, capslock light turns on / off with capslock. Weirdly "F5" turns on / off numlock (F6 is numlock but wont work).
All the usual key combos at boot do nothing (pram reset, open firmware, etc). I have removed the battery and held the power button down for 5 seconds (to discharge capacitors....?!).
I have connected an external monitor and still no display.
Battery charges. Power adapter looks ok. I checked with multimeter and get about 20v when plugged in. No difference if on battery, battery + psu or just psu.
I have stripped it down, disconnected the drives, removed airport card, modem and reed switch. No change.
I thought it was the u28 issue. I placed pressure on this chip and actually triggered the no display/ full fan on boot issue (the pressure may have disconnected one of the legs). I then reflowed the solder on both sides of the chip and returned it to the above sad state.
I'm almost going to bin this thing or give it up for parts.
As I get the chime (does that mean hardware test ok?) I'm wondering if I have a scrambled PRAM situation or something. Dead super capacitor? Would the iBook boot without the super capacitor?
Any ideas?
I got it out last weekend with plans to upgrade it, ordered upgrades (ram and hdd) but when using it on the Sunday...the $%^& thing died!
What happened? I was fooling in OSX and had Onyx open, cleaning out all the temp files, cache files, etc. There was an option to reset all user permissions (or something like that?) which I selected. Onyx required the machine be rebooted. When I rebooted, I have dual boot and accidentally booted into Lubuntu PPC. Machine was working fine. I rebooted again and selected macos. It booted ok but I got to a screen with a constant rotating timer (animated graphic). I thought maybe it is the user permission thing going on in the background so I left the ibook running at this point, on a charger, in my study.
I checked up on it 2 hours later and it was still going (rotating timer). As I was going to order the new hdd, I wasnt really concerned about data loss on the drive so did a hard shutdown (held powerbutton down) and tried to start it again. Unfortunately it didnt power up this time
The symptons I get are;
Power on - Chimes,drives start up like they are wanting to boot, no display, No fan. Stays like this forever...there is no display. I have disconnected the hdd and dvd drive and no change.
Holding power down at startup - chime, fan starts up, long beep, 10 flashes of sleep light, chime (as per normal startup above)
When powered up, capslock light turns on / off with capslock. Weirdly "F5" turns on / off numlock (F6 is numlock but wont work).
All the usual key combos at boot do nothing (pram reset, open firmware, etc). I have removed the battery and held the power button down for 5 seconds (to discharge capacitors....?!).
I have connected an external monitor and still no display.
Battery charges. Power adapter looks ok. I checked with multimeter and get about 20v when plugged in. No difference if on battery, battery + psu or just psu.
I have stripped it down, disconnected the drives, removed airport card, modem and reed switch. No change.
I thought it was the u28 issue. I placed pressure on this chip and actually triggered the no display/ full fan on boot issue (the pressure may have disconnected one of the legs). I then reflowed the solder on both sides of the chip and returned it to the above sad state.
I'm almost going to bin this thing or give it up for parts.
As I get the chime (does that mean hardware test ok?) I'm wondering if I have a scrambled PRAM situation or something. Dead super capacitor? Would the iBook boot without the super capacitor?
Any ideas?
