Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

firewire2001

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 2, 2002
718
0
Hong Kong
I have a 867MHZ 12" Aluminum PowerBook G4 that will mostly not boot up; to be precise, when I press the power-on button I hear some clicks, which I believe to be the speakers, and I hear the CD-ROM Drive click. Interestingly enough, also, if I hit the "Caps Lock" key, the light indicating that the "Caps Lock" is on is illuminated. This "Caps Lock" light will stay on until I depress the "Caps Lock" key again, or when i hold down the power-on button for five seconds.
 

MentalFabric

macrumors 6502
Mar 10, 2004
372
25
How sure are you that the clicks are from the speakers? This could be your hard drive dying making clicks - if you've got another mac and a firewire cable restart the other mac in target disk mode (holding T on startup) when the two computers are connected w/ the firewire cable, then see if you can start up from that mac's HD on the powerbook (holding option on startup and checking available drives, of course if the drive is really dead it won't show up if you do that on startup anyway).

Could also be a dead screen, and the computer is starting up but you can't see it?

There's a small chance it could be a horrific software problem.

Other than that, yeah, sounds like logic board problem.
 

diamond geezer

macrumors regular
Jan 26, 2004
156
0
If you've installed RAM into the SODIMM slot, try removing that. The 12" PB has no backup battery, so try removing the battery for 20 minutes, then plug it into the mains and try again.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.