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#1
October 25th, 2006, 07:13 AM
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| iBook G4 crashed & boot disks won't work! My mother called me tonight frantic -- her iBook G4 hangs before the apple logo at startup (empty grey screen). She is terrified she has lost a year's work. I reassured her that there were plenty of things I could do -- run disk utility from OS X install disk, reinstall OS X, or -- if all else failed -- just boot using a firewire HDD and grab all the files I can off the internal HDD before replacing it. So I drove to her house after work, very confident. To my horror, none of things are working... - The HDD never shows up in the installer, so I cannot re-install OS X to the internal hdd. - Disk Utility hangs when i try to run it - Holding down Alt at startup to choose the attached Firewire HDD doesn't work -- I get the ticking clock cursor forever and no HDD shows up (I tested booting from the same HDD on my iMac and it works fine). - Choosing 'start up disk' from the OS X install disk also doesn't work; the firewire HDD shows up, and allows me to select it and hit the "restart" button, but it them just things about it forever and never actually restarts. - Tried hooking up iMac to iBook with a firewire cable and holding down the "T" key. All I saw was the firewire symbol bouncing around the screen and nothing more. i've never done that before, so I wasn't sure what I was supposed to see, but I couldn't seem to do anything. EDIT: Just tried hardware test, but is also hangs at loading screen and never begins. I'm all out of ideas. The iBook is only a couple months outside of the warranty, and my mum is very annoyed. She's even talking of switching back to Windows! please help!
__________________ Podwatch: Podcast Reviews: Blog | Podcast iPhone: 8GB, 1.1.3, Unlocked | MacBook Pro: 2Ghz CoreDuo, 2GB RAM, OS X 10.5.2 | Apple TV: 160GB Last edited by Thank The Cheese; October 25th, 2006 at 07:42 AM.  |
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#2
October 25th, 2006, 09:06 AM
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| First try to reset the PRAM. To me it sounds as if the the hard drive failed. The PRAM reset should let you use the back firewire drive again, hopefully. Good Luck.
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#3
October 25th, 2006, 10:02 AM
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| Hello satcomer, thanks for the help. unfortunately after resetting the PRAM I still can't seem to boot off the firewire drive. While I understand the internal HDD may be toast, I'm not sure why the external HDD won't boot -- after all, isn't that the point of allowing one to boot from an external HDD? Does the fact that I cannot boot from it suggest another issue? On a side note, presuming the internal HDD is beyond repair -- what are the chances of recovering the data?
__________________ Podwatch: Podcast Reviews: Blog | Podcast iPhone: 8GB, 1.1.3, Unlocked | MacBook Pro: 2Ghz CoreDuo, 2GB RAM, OS X 10.5.2 | Apple TV: 160GB |
