G4 17" Powerbook won't boot?

retrotron

retrotron

thinking is design
I'm brand new to the world of macs, I know nothing.

My G4 17" Powerbook that I've owned for less than 36 hours suddenly won't start up. I haven't done anything to it except boot it a few times and install a trial version of Flash MX. I did get a kernel panic on boot at one point, but a safe boot fixed that.

When I press the power button, I hear the chimes, and then I hear the disks starting up (hard drive? optical drive?). Then the disks sound like they slow down and stop. Nothing happens. The screen stays blank. It appears the computer is still on, because I can hold the button down for a few seconds and then start it up again (and the same blank screen happens). The installation CD that came with it is in the drive, but holding down the mouse button at boot doesn't eject it.

Power cord and battery seem to be in proper working order, and I've tried it both with and without each of them.

Can anybody help me?
 
This might be far to trivial, but is your screen brightness turned up?

I doubt this is it... but if you discovered it was this after hours of trying to figure out what was wrong, you'd be kicking yourself.

Josh
 
Hey thanks for the replies!

As for the RAM, I guess I'd have to open the powerbook to check that, and that would void my warranty, no? I probably should wait until the warranty's up so I can take advantage of free service. Besides, it's only 48 hours old, that'd be an annoying factory error if the RAM was loose. When I do check the RAM, how do I do that in a powerbook?

As for the brightness, I don't even know how to adjust the brightness. I can't seem to find any knobs or buttons or anything that might adjust that. Perhaps the brightness is controlled from the OS on a new Powerbook?
 
As far as accessing the RAM, on the 17" powerbook I believe it is under the battery, I don't think it would void your warrenty to check it, but you still might want to just call, use the support service, and have them tell you to check the RAM, that way you won't void any warrenty stuff.

As far as the brightness, F1 and F2 control screen brightness, next to the ESC key.

Hope that helps,
Josh
 

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You should have a little white manual that came with the box, which details how to do certain things, like changing RAM and turning brightness up/down.

In a 12" PowerBook RAM is accessed from the bottom, there is a compartment with four screws. Open them up (this will absolutely NOT void your warranty) and there is the RAM compartment.

Brightness can be tuned via two buttons on the keyboard: F1 for down, F2 for up. THere should be two little icons, sun-like symbols, on those buttons.

With my 12" PB came a "Hardware test" CD or DVD. You might try to use that or boot from your install CD, if it is a software problem. You might try to reinstall everything from scratch.

I hope things work out for you! :)

EDIT: josh beat me to it ...
 
Hey thanks all, this is great.

Ha ha, thanks for the pic josh, I feel sheepish now. ;)

Also thanks for the info on the RAM, very helpful.

I've tried booting from the CD but I can't even get that far. Just a blank screen before it can get anywhere. I also tried clearing the PMU, booting in safe, single, verbose, etc. But always the same.

My guess is the video may not be working, or something's wrong that prevents a boot (to anything), hence it never gets far enough to start video.

I called Apple and they ran me through some stuff, but since we couldn't get anything to make any difference, they're having me ship it back and they're sending a new one.

Maybe I should check the RAM for fun before I ship it back.

Anyways, thanks for the tips, much appreciated, and if any other ideas about it hit you, let me know as it would be nice to know if it ever happens again.
 
I had the same problem with my pb 12. My problem was that the backlight would not come on. That may be your problem as well. I could not see the screen but plugging it in to an external monitor I could see everything and the computer worked great. I had also had mine for 36 hours.

I sent it into apple on a monday afternoon and they had it back to me on wednesday afternoon after replacing a pcba inverter board assembly. That, to me, is great turn-around service time from apple
 
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