PowerBook G4 problems

[Apostrophe]

Hi,

My dad has a platinum PowerBook G4 laptop that has been acting strange lately. When you hit the power button, a gray screen comes up and the little wheel made up of lines facing the center starts spinning, which is normal. But it keeps spinning...and spinning...and spinning...in fact, Dad left it on for several hours once, just to see if it would ever boot up. But the wheel kept spinning...and spinning... and spinning...

Obviously, he wants it fixed. Looking through these forums, at various computer failures, my hypothesis is that a capacitor is leaking. Is this the case? Anyway, acting on this theory, I opened the laptop (which was quite a hassle, believe me. It'll take a while to figure out where all the screws go to close it up :-/ ) I looked at the circuit board, which had no visible capacitors. I can only assume that any existing capacitors are on the other side. Now, I have never in my life opened a laptop before, so I am a complete newbie at this. I know that to some of you, this will be a stupid question, but do G4 laptops even have capacitors?

Assuming they do (I think they do, but as I said, I've never opened a laptop, so I have to be sure, right?) how do I go about taking off the circuit board?

To clear things up, I have no intention whatsoever of fixing anything unless it's something I know I'll be able to do. My goal for now is just pinpointing the problem.

Any helpful comments or suggestions are welcome!

-Apostrophe

 

[Franklinstein]

Did you try booting the thing from CD or FireWire or anything? Could just be a corrupted installation or a bad hard drive. I would've checked those first.

As for capacitors, yes, there are a few on there. In fact, more than a few. However, there aren't all that many electrolytics compared to a desktop or anything; most electrolytics are in the power brick for notebooks, though there are a few for power filtering, and the iBooks use a large one for retaining date and time during a quick battery change (though not if the computer's in sleep mode).

No, most of the caps on those are usually ceramic or possibly tantalum, and are generally very, very small. Most Macs (like many other products) label their capacitors with C and a number, such as C143. So, most components on your board labeled like that are probably capacitors. Since ceramic and tantalum capacitors rarely die before a few decades have passed, and since there are undoubtedly 100 or so on the average board, it'll be more trouble than it's worth to try to replace them.

 

[Da Penguin]

Sounds like a bad HD to me as well. 75% of the time a bad OS access generates that type of behavior. I would try both the CD and Firewire drive methods mentioned above. I had a TiBook that had both the HD and CD ATA controllers fried, but it would still boot off of a firewire drive.

Check your ram as well too. While it wouldn't (typically) cause this kind of behavior, a good reseating will help make sure that isn't complicating things as well.

TBird

 

[Apostrophe]

Ok, thanks.

I was wondering about the hard drive, but I wasn't sure because the older Macs actually tell you the HDD is corrupted by displaying the floppy disk with a question mark. I wasn't sure if the newer laptops did that or just sat there...

Okay, well I'm going to try and figure out where all those screws go to put it back together...then I'll try and get hold of an OSX CD on eBay. (Or even better, tell my dad to do it. It's his laptop, after all. )

-Apostrophe

 

[jhvaughan2]

If you have another mac with firewire, you can also try booting it into target disk mode and running disk utility on the other mac.

One thing to try if you get a boot-able OSX install cd /dvd is -- before re-installation of os, selecting disk utility from the menu and running "repair disk" on hard drive. I've corrected this kind of problem before (and even the question mark folder symptom). This will prevent loss of files on the disk.

One last reminder, make sure the OS install matches the drive. Some TI books did not come with DVD so if you get a Tiger install DVD then your back to using the TDM method.

JHV