Hi there,
The job that i am affiliated with owns a Powerbook G4 that was purchased in 2004. in the past few months it's been having some freeze-and-then-boot problems which after some rebooting and resetting has come back fine, but today i've hit a brick wall in terms of troubleshooting.
when my coworker first called me up, he said that it froze and when he rebooted it gave the prohibitive sign. he tried to reboot again and it did the initial chime sound, but the screen remained black.
i went over to troubleshoot. of the twenty or so times that i attempted to boot the machine, it would chime and then stay black every single time except twice:
- one was in single-user mode (command-s). I ran fcsk -yf and it came back and said that everything was okay. when i hit "reboot", it booted up, but as soon as i attempted to put in my coworker's jump drive to backup files he had not updated since yesterday, it froze beyond help.
- one was a random occurrence, but rather than boot it gave me a kernel panic screen with a 0x300 kernel trap error of which i was not able to garner useful information.
I tried the following to boot up:
-resetting pram. It did not successfully reset the pram, screen remained black and did not chime a second time.
-single-user mode. This was successful once as stated above, but did not work again.
-holding down [shift] (to disable extensions?). Again, did not get past black screen.
-holding command-v. i'm not sure what this was supposed to do, but it did not do anything different.
-holding down C with a boot disk. the DVD drive churned and was clearly spinning the whole time i was holding down C, but it still did not move past the black screen after the initial chime.
i have not yet tried target mode to get the files off that we need - i'll likely do that later today, but i want to address the root issue because this is beyond my troubleshooting experience. Even when there have been certain issues that i've had to deal with, i've never gotten to a point where it refuses to move past the initial chime with no indications whatsoever.
A few other notes:
some months back when we were having problems, i did reinstall the OS (with Tiger, not Leopard). I did a clean install that separated the previous system folder as opposed to overwrite (i think that's called "archive and install" now). This seemed to resolve the issue for a few months before it started acting up again.
i'm fairly positive that in the time that we've reinstalled the OS and even before, the only software that was installed were an upgrade of MakeMusic's Finale and a copy of Microsoft Office X including Entourage.
Push comes to shove, i'm going to take it to a genius at an apple store to diagnose, but i was hoping that i could get an idea from people here. everything i see points to this being a hardware issue. does that seem likely? If so or if not, does anyone have any words of wisdom? Is the whole thing just f'ed, should we try to replace the CPU?...
Thanks very much for your input.
-d
The job that i am affiliated with owns a Powerbook G4 that was purchased in 2004. in the past few months it's been having some freeze-and-then-boot problems which after some rebooting and resetting has come back fine, but today i've hit a brick wall in terms of troubleshooting.
when my coworker first called me up, he said that it froze and when he rebooted it gave the prohibitive sign. he tried to reboot again and it did the initial chime sound, but the screen remained black.
i went over to troubleshoot. of the twenty or so times that i attempted to boot the machine, it would chime and then stay black every single time except twice:
- one was in single-user mode (command-s). I ran fcsk -yf and it came back and said that everything was okay. when i hit "reboot", it booted up, but as soon as i attempted to put in my coworker's jump drive to backup files he had not updated since yesterday, it froze beyond help.
- one was a random occurrence, but rather than boot it gave me a kernel panic screen with a 0x300 kernel trap error of which i was not able to garner useful information.
I tried the following to boot up:
-resetting pram. It did not successfully reset the pram, screen remained black and did not chime a second time.
-single-user mode. This was successful once as stated above, but did not work again.
-holding down [shift] (to disable extensions?). Again, did not get past black screen.
-holding command-v. i'm not sure what this was supposed to do, but it did not do anything different.
-holding down C with a boot disk. the DVD drive churned and was clearly spinning the whole time i was holding down C, but it still did not move past the black screen after the initial chime.
i have not yet tried target mode to get the files off that we need - i'll likely do that later today, but i want to address the root issue because this is beyond my troubleshooting experience. Even when there have been certain issues that i've had to deal with, i've never gotten to a point where it refuses to move past the initial chime with no indications whatsoever.
A few other notes:
some months back when we were having problems, i did reinstall the OS (with Tiger, not Leopard). I did a clean install that separated the previous system folder as opposed to overwrite (i think that's called "archive and install" now). This seemed to resolve the issue for a few months before it started acting up again.
i'm fairly positive that in the time that we've reinstalled the OS and even before, the only software that was installed were an upgrade of MakeMusic's Finale and a copy of Microsoft Office X including Entourage.
Push comes to shove, i'm going to take it to a genius at an apple store to diagnose, but i was hoping that i could get an idea from people here. everything i see points to this being a hardware issue. does that seem likely? If so or if not, does anyone have any words of wisdom? Is the whole thing just f'ed, should we try to replace the CPU?...
Thanks very much for your input.
-d
