PowerBook G4 12in boots to Blue Screen and then nothing.

[Elfen]

This one is stumping me. A friend's PowerBook would not boot, kept crashing on spinning "sundail" so my friend told me to format it and install a new system on it. I did.

Nothing. It goes to boot as if it were trying to boot but then dies at a blue screen at the end of the boot process before desktop. I googled about and most posts I found is that it's a hard drive problem. But it will boot in Safe Mode, but not in Normal Mode. I tried to reinstall the system several times, including zeroing out the hard drive with a format in Disk Utilities. Still nothing.

This one has me stumped.

 

[Byrd]

Try burning the install media on another disc - it could be the optical drive that is struggling to get it to boot to the installer.  Does it still boot off the HD OK?

 

[rsolberg]

Did Disk Utility throw any errors when zeroing the hard drive? I'd also look for the drive's SMART status in Disk Utility if you haven't already. I've had failing disks allow an OS install many times, but fail between power on and the desktop. I also wonder about potential GPU issues since it boots in Safe mode, but hangs before the GUI loads on a normal boot.

 

[johnklos]

The video chip on those had a bad habit of dying. If you want to confirm whether it's that, boot in to single user mode, then:

mount /

mkdir /var/root/NVIDIA

mv /System/Library/Extensions/NV* /var/root/NVIDIA/

reboot

If it boots and runs but without any graphics acceleration, then you know for sure that the NVIDIA hardware died.

 

[Elfen]

I'm thinking that it is the hard drive. Though Disk Utility throws up no errors or warnings.

Used Clone Carbon Copier to copy my G4's (the one I'm use as my daily driver and am using to post this) hard drive to my friend's hard drive.

Now, here the funny part.

From turning on from a power down state, it gets to about to boot and throws up a kernel panic window right before desktop. BUT THEN IF I reset the machine with Apple-Option-Power Button to get out of the Kernel Panic, it boots normally.

 

[Macdrone]

Turn off airport.  Kernel panic at boot is a known issue with the powerbook G4's.  I have 2 right now that do the same thing.  There is a bunch of listings on the net about the issue but its so old no one looked into how to fix it and the exact problem.  Not sure if its the card or motherboard.

 

[Elfen]

AirPort is off.

I'm wondering if it is RAM, besides the hard drive. the machine only has 768mb of RAM and not a full Gig.

I forgot to answer - it boots from the CD/DVD just fine, it's booting from the hard drive that is the problem. Considering that the machine is from 2004; the hard drive is over 11 years old.

Q: Is there any low-level formatting for the Mac PPC? I know there is plenty for the PC/Windows but I would like not to open the PB and pull the drive to put into PC and low-level format it. It's too much work for one drive.

 

[Macdrone]

low level? yes in a different term, sector by sector or long format in disk utility

 

[butterburger]

Start from CD, run

time cat < /dev/rdisk0 | wc -c

, or

time dd if=/dev/rdisk0 of=/dev/null bs=1m

, or something else. Assuming disk0 is internal HDD. If there is no error, then HDD is readable and likely not the problem.

edit : I hate this implementation of BBcode.