iBook G4 problem.

[jslane]

Alright, so I have had my iBook G4 30gb 1GHz since late 2004 (archaic, I know). It starting having problems in September of 06, so I bought a new iMac. Now the iBook just sits in my closet in it's original box. I keep looking at it and thinking that if it was fixed it would be a good little machine to use while traveling.

The problem it has right now is that when I go to turn it on, the grey apple screen flashes for about half a second and then the whole thing goes to black. My HDD makes some pretty crude noises but I'm not sure if that is the issue. Would it be a good idea to try to boot it from an external HDD to see if that is indeed the problem (and how would I go about doing that)?

Thanks.

[Frida]

You can connect the iBook to your iMac with a firewire cable and start it up in "target disk mode". Once connected, reboot the iBook and hold down the T key until a firewire symbol starts bouncing around the screen. You can now access the iBook's HD from the iMac to do diagnostics with DiskUtility, DiskWarrior or whatever.