I have an almost-5-year-old 12" iBook G3 with 128 megs of RAM and original 20GB drive that seemed fine until tonight. My wife attempted to open a fairly large Word document (16,000 pages) with about 600 megs of free disk space when the machine crashed and she couldn't reboot. Kept getting the question mark/empty folder icon.
I put the iBook into target disk mode and the drive came up fine on my eMac desktop. I rescued some files, tossed a bunch of stuff to free up 4GB of disk space on the iBook, verified the drive with Disk Utility, then shut down and attempted to reboot. Still wouldn't work.
It booted up off the original system CD without a problem, so I thought perhaps I should just reinstall the latest version of OS X via target disk mode. Except that when I tried to boot up the iBook by holding down the "T" key, all that happened was it shut off the power. Huh?
I repeated this process several times with the same results. Chimes play, then power shuts down.
If I try to install directly from the system CD, the installer can't find the hard drive at all.
I suspect it's the drive, but why would I have been able to get target disk mode to work the one time and not others? Is the computer shutting down while holding the "T" key symptomatic of a bad drive or something else?
Please help!
I put the iBook into target disk mode and the drive came up fine on my eMac desktop. I rescued some files, tossed a bunch of stuff to free up 4GB of disk space on the iBook, verified the drive with Disk Utility, then shut down and attempted to reboot. Still wouldn't work.
It booted up off the original system CD without a problem, so I thought perhaps I should just reinstall the latest version of OS X via target disk mode. Except that when I tried to boot up the iBook by holding down the "T" key, all that happened was it shut off the power. Huh?
I repeated this process several times with the same results. Chimes play, then power shuts down.
If I try to install directly from the system CD, the installer can't find the hard drive at all.
I suspect it's the drive, but why would I have been able to get target disk mode to work the one time and not others? Is the computer shutting down while holding the "T" key symptomatic of a bad drive or something else?
Please help!
