Thank The Cheese
Registered
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!
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!
