PowerBook Titanium G4 not booting up

[Anyabekx]

My father has bought a PowerBook Titanium G4 DVI 867 mhz/15,2/512 ram/combo that has boot up problems that I'd really appreciate if someone could help me with.

When it arrived it took 8/15 mins to boot, but otherwise worked ok all be it slow. Then yesterday safari frozen and he restarted the machine. Only it wouldn't restart but got stuck after the apple logo and spinning 'gear' and displayed a no entry sign.

When tried a PRAM reset but no joy. To fix this I wiped the machine clean and did a standard install of Tiger as it only came with purchased Tiger software discs and not the original ones. (I have 2 Macs myself, but I know when to ask for a more experienced opinion!) It booted fine, worked fine and then when he came to use it again, it wouldn't boot up and stuck on the apple logo and spinning gear.

The only way I could get it to do anything was another fresh reinstall booting from the Tiger disc. However, when I first tried the installation program didn't recognize the Mac hard drive/volume on which to do the reinstall, then on a second attempted it did. But it now wont boot up again!!!

I'm guessing the hard drive's gone down, hence the painfully slow start up speed when he first had it and the Tiger disc not seeing the Mac volume? Or am I missing something?

Thanks for any help in advance! ;-D

 

[DeltaMac]

I think you are on the right track...
The symptoms (extra long boot, losing the hard drive intermittently on boot) sound like a dying hard drive.
The hard drive might even pass testing, but you would probably notice that even the testing takes a painfully long time.
Replacing the hard drive on the titanium G4 is straightforward.

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

It does sound like the hard drive is dying. Not much you can do about that other than replace the hard drive.

When the computer was purchased, it should have come with an AHT ("Apple Hardware Test") CD or DVD. If you still have this, boot from that CD/DVD and run the extended test in loop mode. This will inform you of any errors that the test detects, and could verify that it is, indeed, the hard drive that is dying.