urgent, can someone help me please?

[konrad]

on my pismo powerbook, 192mb ram, something strange happened.
i connected an external firewire hard disk, running 10.1. everything worked well.
then suddenly, the powerbook crashed. since then, i could not boot up os x. it freezed at the happy mac screen, the cursor still spinning. in verbose mode, it runs until the "starting debugger" message, then freezes.
i can boot up from my 9.2 partition using the alt-key at startup, but- the firewire ports dont work. if i use target disk mode, the other mac wont mount my harddisk and cant see anything on the firewire bus. the cable is ok.
next step for me was to completely format the harddisk and try to reinstall 10.1 but it still freezes at the happy mac screen. 9.2 installs without any problems. oh yes, before this whole sh** happened, i installed the open firmware password protection, but now i disabled it from the open firmware prompt.
now, can somneone help me? is this a hardware defect of the "firewire controller"? is there some way to test it?

thank you very much

konrad

[edX]

sorry, i don't check this forum on a regular basis. your problem sounds similar to what happens on my imac. i have to unplug the firewire drive and then it finishes booting. i then plug it back in. works fine and will continue to reboot untill i boot in 9 and go back to osx. then i repeat procedure and move on. I believe i need to update the firmware on my maxtor but am putting this off since maxtor is such a pain to deal with.
at any rate, try unplugging and plugging and see what happens.

[dsnyder]

I do not check this forum regularly, either. So, I hope you have already found a solution, but if not, see below.

Your Powerbook should have come this an "Apple Hardware Test" cd. You should probably run this to verify that this is not a hardware problem (fried Firewire controller, etc.). To run AHT, boot from the CD (hold down "C" on the keyboard with the CD in the drive when you start up) and run the full diagnostic (if I remember correctly, you have 2 options-- a quick test and a full test). This should tell you if you have a bad Firewire controller or other logic board component.

If the Firewire test does fail, you'll need to get the machine repaired (which probably means a new logic board, which is probably going to be expensive if it's not under warranty anymore).

I hope this helps,

David