Logic Board Problem? Help

D

das-r

Registered
Hi,

I recently was given an Ibook G4 from a family member who had bought a newer machine. When they had it they told me that occasionally when it boots up it displays a folder and goes no further, they told me that restarting it solves this and that it was probably a tired hard drive. I decided to replace it with a Western Digital 160GB HDD. I done the same to my G4 power book a few years ago without any problems so had no issues doing it. When i booted it up i inserted the install discs and went to do a fresh install. After a few attempts at getting the mac to discover the hard drive i eventually got the machine to start running the OS X installtion discs with varying results each time.

A number of times the machine installs the os and seems fine and tells me to restart on completion. When i do the machine does not boot up from the disc again and i have to run the stallation again and again. This seems to keep on going on and on. Now some times the mac freezes when installing the OS and other times when i begin the process it cant find the hard drive. On one occasion it loaded the OS fine and i could use it. When i restarted the computer i got the folder icon and had to start again.

Is this a logic board problem? I dont think it is a hard drive issue as i had the same problem with the original 30gb hard drive.

Any help would be appreciated as im getting close to getting the sledge hammer out:mad:
 
I'd check the HDD flex cable first. Where it connects to the logic board is not very secure and could easily come loose when replacing the drive. You'll need to remove the bottom case and bottom shield again to get to it, but at least that's only half way to pulling the HD out again. Other than that you will have to go further and check the cables connection to the drive and make sure all the pins are in good condition. Also its not unusual (but not common) for the cables to go bad.
 
Hi, thanks for taking the time to post a response. I have looked at that and everything looks pretty good and soundly pushed home.

Any other ideas?
 
Try the drive in an external enclosure through firewire to see how it behaves. Just because a cable looks good doesn't mean there is not something wrong with it. I guess you could try that drive in the powerbook to see if it installs and runs the OS. At least then you will be able to rule out the drive and narrow it down to the flex cable or the HDD controller on the logic board.
 
I have a dead G3, will that have the same ribbon connector? Could give that a go first as i dont have an external disc cage.
 
Ok, I got hold of another HD (only 30gb) installed it into the machine, run disk utility and then installed OSX. Went on perfect, set up my account as if the machine was new out the box and left it on for five minutes, restarted it once no problem (perhaps a little slow on the grey screen with the apple icon and whirling circle but it loaded fine, restarted it another 3 times - no problem. Took it into work today to do a few updates on it and now it just hangs on the grey screen with the apple logo and swirling circle.

Any ideas anyone??? Is there a fix i could try?

Cheers
 
das-r said:
Any ideas anyone??? Is there a fix i could try?
Click to expand...

Anything else it could be has been mentioned above. If you have no access to a known good flex cable you are dead in the water unless you want to purchase an external firewire enclosure for the drive and boot the machine externally all the time.
 
Cheers, one of my mates has one of them. Popping over after work to borrow it. If i take the hard drive out of the machine and stick it in the enclosure, will the machine boot up without an internal hard drive connected?
 
If you hold the option key to go to the boot manager and pick the drive. If you want it to continue booting that way, go into system preferences/start-up disk and select that drive as the main boot device.
 
I got hold of an external HD enclosure last night. Prior to that i fired the ibook up and it ran normal, i then restarted 3 times in a row and it was fine. Thought id try one more time for luck and it started playing up again, it could not fine the HD. I then restarted with the install discs and went into disc utility. It showed the harddrive as 0gb and it had and obscure name next to it!

I decided to leave the hard drive in the machine and use another one connected by firewire in a hard drive enclosure. Installed the OS onto it fine and then started up the machine and all was good and i updated the os fully. I tried restarting a few times and all worked. I then though about sticking a DVD in to test the machine. I went into system preferences and changed the power mode to dvd playback and at this point the machine froze and would not recover. I had to force the machine to close down. I then had trouble restarting the unit, took 5 attempts. It now is booting up again but still freezes when i try to alter the energy saver settings.

Im beginning to think the problem may be something else as i have noticed at no point the fan has come on and the machine has been getting quite hot. This sound familiar to anyone?
 
Ok, after using the external enclosure, i installed a fresh copy of tiger onto the hard drive and had no problems. Everything works fine, so i stuck the install discs in, formatted the hard drive in the machine, installed the drivers and when it asked me to reboot after installation, the machine restarted and went straight back into the installation menu on the disc, tried this a few times without much joy. Swapped the hard drives over and booted the machine up and it launched tiger fine.

I have fired up the ibook successfully now about 30 times, its been on all day as well playing movies all day long so everything appears good, then when i went to restart the machine instead of shutting down, i hit the familiar problem of the computer not finding the HD. I have just successfully turned the machine off and then booted 10 times in a row without a problem. If however when i try to restart the system instead of shut down i hit the problem again.

I think the issue i have been having is that when i install the os i needs to restart to fire up the os, hence not being able to install the software and trying to install again and again.

I have just written up this post on the forum now on the ibook.

Just wondering if anyone else has had this problem and if there is a fix. Basically the ibook fires up fine and shuts down fine but will not restart.

Weird!
 
das-r said:
If however when i try to restart the system instead of shut down i hit the problem again.

I think the issue i have been having is that when i install the os i needs to restart to fire up the os, hence not being able to install the software and trying to install again and again.
Click to expand...

As a matter of fact I ran across that exact same issue on an ibook I was looking at some months ago. Cold start would boot it every time. Could set startup disk on an external drive and restart every time that way. But absolutely would not restart from the internal drive. Tried different drive, different cable, reinstalled OS. Can only assume it was a faulty HDD controller on the logic board. Told the customer just to limp it along that way and he could not restart unless he held the option key to go to boot manager and choose the internal drive to boot from that way, because otherwise it wasn't worth sinking the money into it for a new logic board.
 
Thanks for letting me know i wasnt alone with this problem. Shame really, other than this problem the machine works great, amazingly fast for its age. Would say it performs better than my Powerbook of the same age.

Thanks again djackmac!
 
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