Powerbook G4 Not-Booting Problem

[gunug]

I'm working on one of the brushed aluminum 15-inch 1.5_1.33GHz G4 Powerbooks and the problem is it won't boot.
It runs through to the smiley MAC/question mark screen and never boots if left to it's own.  If you try to boot from
a system disk by holding down the "C" key you either get the black Apple on the grey background which tears across the
screen in a small increment after a couple of dark lines appear around the Apple, or you get the warning thing that says
'You must reboot" in several languages over the top of a kernal panic warning, or you get an endless spinning hash marks
around in a circle thing depending on which disk you're trying to startup on!  

I have tested the memory using a hardware testing device and it's good and original (2- 256meg SODIMMs).  I just can't
test anything else without being being able to boot something.  Next things I'm going to try is 1) booting from an external
firewire drive, and 2) swapping out the hard drive.  

Anyone seen this problem or had this problem before?

[Paddy]

Sounds like the drive is kaput or there is very serious disk/system damage. Try booting from a system CD/DVD and running Disk Utility and see what turns up.

[gunug]

Oh, I've tried to boot from 10.3 and 10.5 (My 10.4 is at home) but I just got it to boot from a 2005 version of AppleCare/Techtool Deluxe (it wouldn't boot either the 2004 or the newest and it ran through everything automatically except the "surface scan" of the hard drive which wasn't checked the first time!  It's scanning fine according to this fine software product!

Later: I just realized I had DiskWarrior in my CD case and got it to boot up and start to rebuild.  Stuck on Step 8 (Rebuilding Directory) with a message "Reading from CD, one moment please. . ." and a spinning beachball for the last 35 minutes or so!  I'll probably disconnect the power and see if it will run on battery till I get home if it's still running at 4pm or so my time (3:08pm now)!

[gunug]

I took the thing home and I got DiskWarrior to complete "rebuild" on the drive and call it good but the thing wouldn't boot.  I then got it to boot off an external firewire drive and it worked fine.  I then ran DiskUtility on the drive and it said it was good and S.M.A.R.T. tests passed.  Tried repartition and install off 2 different sets of media (both valid) and the thing starts out and then stalled both times (suggests a restart).

My question is have many of you seen a drive on that would test "good" but not allow itself to be have and install done?  I'm going to pull the drive and see if I can find another but I'm wondering!

[krissel]

If you can't get it to properly utilize your optical media (CD/DVD) perhaps there is something starting to go wrong with that end of things.  

While the hard drive sounded like it was bad initially, it could have been just the system at that point. Try booting from the external and clone that install to the main hard drive. See if it will boot then. If not, I wouldn't trust it (not sure I would anyway).

[gunug]

It will boot fine off an external firewire drive and I also tried to install from a copy of a 10.4 install DVD that I've got on a different partition on the external drive and it bombs out on that as well.  I've used that partition at work as recently as last Wednesday!  I've seen older iMAC's that wouldn't start up because of a damaged/malfunctioning CD drive so I suppose that the optical drive could be faulty but as I'm sure to have a spare hard drive around I don't have a spare optical drive so we'll see!

[Bruce_F]

My 15" Aluminum PowerBook had a very similar problem. Most of files I wanted to keep were already backed up so I reformatted the drive and did a fresh installation of Leopard. It's been fine ever since then.

[gunug]

I have already tried to reformat and repartition the thing and that "pretends" to work but for some reason it won't take a new system install.  I'm going to try Tuesday (I'm off tomorrow) with a new hard drive and see where it goes from there; thanks all!