iBook G3 Dual USB Powers to Blank Gray Screen

#1 Fri, 30 Jan 2015 - 01:06

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!

#2 Fri, 30 Jan 2015 - 10:16

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?

#3 Sat, 31 Jan 2015 - 20:09

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.

#4 Sun, 1 Feb 2015 - 12:57

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

#5 Tue, 3 Feb 2015 - 17:03

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.

#6 Thu, 12 Feb 2015 - 15:55

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