Whats happened to my iBook G4?

[SuperToaster]

I put in my OS 10.4 install CD and.. this. 

 

[SuperToaster]

Its all in grayscale for some reason

 

[unity]

Odd. Try a PRAM reset.

 

[SuperToaster]

whats also strange is in the installer it won't recognize the touchpad it yells at me to plug in a mouse

 

[SuperToaster]

also the machine will never play the start up chime. once I heard it for a breif moment than it stopped.

 

[SuperToaster]

bad on-board RAM?

 

[Byrd]

GPU/voltage regulator failure - press firmly down on the hand rest (you'll need to experiment) to see if you can get it to give more life.

 

[jholt5638]

I have a parts 12in g4 1.2GHz iBook if it is the GPU/VRM it works just missing the HDD. If you want it make me a offer 

 

[SuperToaster]

Why will it tell me to plug in a mouse though? The colors will work fine in startup manager...

 

[jholt5638]

do you have any other installers? Might be bad media

 

[SuperToaster]

That might be true. I used a Mac OS X 10.4 install CD I could try others...

 

[quinterro]

My iBook asked for a mouse with a 10.4 install disc.  10.5 didn't ask.

 

[SuperToaster]

I am going to try a 10.5 install disc next

 

[techknight]

that is definitely a GPU fault. Seen it 1000 times. Strange one, but ive seen it. More common is all out corruption. 

ive seen GPUs fail in odd ways. one of them being frozen picture and LCD fade to white with backlight still on. 

 

[SuperToaster]

What I don't get is that when booting into target disk mode, start up manager, and open firmware the colors work fine. But just not in the installer for some reason. Guess I traded a nice computer for a broken machine I guess I could see if I could bake the motherboard, but I gotta figure out how to take apart one of these. I heard they are very difficult to disassemble. I have also gotten Kernel Panics when I was loading the installer from the CD It said it couldn't find the CPU driver for Powerbook6,7 maybe I just have to use a different OS. I will see.

 

[IPalindromeI]

Drivers probably trigger the GPU to do something other than display a framebuffer and into something that stressed it.

 

[SuperToaster]

Thats why I'm going to try to install 10.5. I tried installing 10.4 on a USB flash drive and it did the same thing as when I tried with the DVD

 

[SuperToaster]

Booting off a usb flash drive is very handy though. 

 

[quinterro]

I booted a Lubuntu 14.04 DVD and it looked a lot like the initial image.  The menu bar and the icons on the desktop looked okay but the background was gibberish.