iBook G3 Dual USB Powers to Blank Gray Screen

[Brooklyn]

Hi, I have a 500mhz iBook Dual G3 that powers to a blank gray screen.  It does chime.  Tried PRAM and PMU resets no help.  Removed airport card and ram simm and still doesn't boot.  I can eject the CDROM OK.

Logic board dead or any other options?

Thanks!

 

[max1zzz]

Probably a could solder joint under the GPU, if you squeeze just to the right of the trackpad when you power it on do you get anything?

 

[Brooklyn]

Turns out surprisingly it was the hard drive. It got stuck in a seek loop or something. If I let the computer sit for about 5 min it would eventually get to the folder with question mark.

If I booted with the option key, I can boot from CD-ROM.

 

[Sherry Haibara]

That's an interesting behavior - one wouldn't normally think that a bad hard drive could lead to this kind of trouble! 
Glad you have figured it out, though - an IDE hard drive can still be found easily these days and will bring back the machine in shipshape

 

[Elfen]

I've had similar issues with dead drives on G3/G4 Powerbooks and iBooks, but if I put in a bootable CD into the drive first, it boots to the cd after a couple of minutes without holding down a key.

With dead drives, I set them up with an SSD, usually a CF on an IDE adapter, and that's it for it - no more problems.

 

[techknight]

Well with SSD CF solutions make sure to align the partitions to match that of the flash blocks, and set cluster/sector sizes to that of the page size. Itll drastically increase performance and reduce spontaneous corruption

 

[LazarusNine]

I've just had this issue with my iBook G3 600MHz. Guessing it must be a hard drive issue as well. The exact same symptoms. The annoying thing is that it's one of those IDE to SD jobs. So, that obviously didn't last long! Really annoyed that I have to take the whole iBook apart again...

 

[Unknown_K]

Millions of screws of all different sizes, hate taking iBooks apart. No idea why it takes so much effort just to replace the HD on later Apple PPC laptops. Its just 1 screw and remove a cover on a Thinkpad.

I ripped apart one of my T61 Thinkpads last night to swap CPU's (T7300 to T9300) and I had to removed about 15 screws (3 sizes I think) and took maybe 20 minutes.

 

[360alaska]

Probably a could solder joint under the GPU, if you squeeze just to the right of the trackpad when you power it on do you get anything?

500 mhz Ibooks don't have this issue, they have a different video card...

 

[max1zzz]

Any bga array can suffer from cold solder joints, granted it isn't a common problem on the orig dual usb ibooks it can happen so is worth considering if you are getting graphics problems on a dual usb ibook

 

[asaggynoodle]

Millions of screws of all different sizes, hate taking iBooks apart. No idea why it takes so much effort just to replace the HD on later Apple PPC laptops. Its just 1 screw and remove a cover on a Thinkpad.

I ripped apart one of my T61 Thinkpads last night to swap CPU's (T7300 to T9300) and I had to removed about 15 screws (3 sizes I think) and took maybe 20 minutes.

Probably the most difficult laptop (Or any computer I can think of) to tear down. iBook G4's I simply refuse to tear down, litterally will take you an hour just to get the thing apart. Then you literally have enough variety in different screws to fill one of those weekly medicine sorters. If it's that Light grey/white screen before the apple Logo it's more than likely the hard drive. I've seen it a dozen times. Try getting into the Open Firmware console, that will tell you if your computer is working or it's actually a low level problem on the Board/Ram.