Powerbook problem

[Paulomeandi]

My friend has given me his powerbook to fix however im now lost as to what i can do.

One thing i havent got right now is the OS x cd but i should be getting it tonight. However i have burn a linux cd for ppc that should boot.

The story goes that he had left the powerbook on over night and when he got up in the morning it wasnt working.

The powerbook is an older 1ghz ti book with dvi 1gb ram and all the rest.

At first when i got the powerbook it was going into a grey screen with a folder and then a question mark. The harddrive was making the loudest noise around so i thought it must be the harddrive that has died. However i first tried to use the linux cd to see if i could install linux on the drive. The disc would spin and there would be a grey screen for a while... then back to the folder and question mark. Then the disc is ejected. (yes i did hold down c)

So i have no taken an 12gb hd from a laptop and stuck that in there. Sounds much better. However i still get the same response from more then one linux disc that i have on my hands.

I have run out of ideas and cant get the powerbook to do anything but go to the grey screen. Ive tried reading lots on the web about reseting things by holding down buttons and they seem to work. However i cannot get into that open firmware thing (im not sure if thats what its called im more of a pc man.)

Anyone got any ideas? Could it be that the motherboard is broken even though it still works and chimes when i turn it on?

 

[billbaloney]

Have you actually tried booting into Open Firmware? It doesn't solve every problem, but I'm just curious if you tried the proper key commands.

Anyway. The original grey screen with blinking folder means that the machine couldn't find a bootable OS.

The first thing you should do is get a proper OS X system disc and try to boot from there. I find that Linux PPC bootable CDs aren't good benchmarks for bootability. If you can't boot from the OS X disc, then you might have a bad logic board, bad CD drive, or both.

You can also boot into target mode (hold down T after the startup chime), use the computer as a Firewire drive, and look at it from another machine.

 

[Paulomeandi]

I put the original drive back in and its been fine since! Very weird. However i know the dvd drive isnt liking the discs i burnt and other discs. Sometimes it works like with Rush hour dvd but not with the rush hour 2 dvd..

 

[billbaloney]

Weird. Well, the original issue and the CD/DVD drive issue are clearly separate problems. That's the kind of multi-pronged troubleshooting you have to engage in when you get someone else's broken computer!