iBook Dead!! Bad Logic Board

Ever seen the movie The Princess Bride? Well, your iBook may be mostly dead, not completely dead...

Grab a Firewire cable, your PowerMac G4, and perform TDM. You might get something to show up on the screen while performing TDM anyways.

Note: If you get the Firewire icon to appear on your iBook, but the Firewire hard drive icon doesn't show up on your Powermac, try restarting your Powermac and repeat TDM.


EDIT: What manca (below post) describes is how to erase your iBook's hard drive through TDM. I recommend first getting TDM up and working so you can access your iBook's hard drive from your PowerMac, and then transfer all the data you need from your iBook's hard drive over to your PowerMac. Then, if you need to, follow his words on reinstalling.

iBook jonz

Man, you have no idea the extent of this saga with my iBook G4. Won't even get into it too much - in short: bought it in November 2003, was replaced in December for Logic Board failure, in April the combo drive failed on the replacement machine, then the logic board was replaced TWICE in succession , the hard drive was replaced as a result.

Oioioioi.

Anyway - I know how to shuttle data back and forth.

The things you can do depend on the extent of data damage on your drive. If your Logic Board was going going gone for a long time, which OS X has a great way of masking, you might have to reinstall once you get a healthy computer.

Here's what I would do:
Try to Target disk your iBook (restert holding the T key until you see a FireWire icon on the screen). It is best to plug your iBook in for this.

Then, free up a partition on an external drive or someplace the same size as your iBook drive. Be aware you must erase the entire disk (destination) if you resize or rearrange partitions.

Then hook your iBook to another mac via FW, open Disk Utility and "Restore" the contents of the iBook drive onto the free partition. (Click one of the drives on the left and choose "restore" from the tabs. Drag the source and the destination drive or partition volume and hit "Restore.") This takes a while, but it restores ALL the data from your drive. It is possible that some of that data is corrupted, because a bad logic board affects prettty much everything that happens, but you can have a dream that it didn't mess up your data too bad.

In any case, you will have complete clone of the internal drive and you can use it to boot from and see if it works fine, if not, you can only copy the data you need from it onto a clean install of your system and apps.

I am currently, and have been for a month, working off a clone I made before my iBook went dead on April 14th.

Please contact me if you need more info on this - I have done so many reinstalls that I know where things relevant to getting back up and running are. So let me know.

If your computer won't target disk, which would suck, I think Disk Savers are your best bet. Depending on the money or time you are willing to invest, and much of both is inevitable, you could try to have it rescued by them or try connecting the drive somewhere else. I would just swallow it and take it somewhere. And be thorough with my backups in the future - that way you never have this issue again.

For backing up I use an external LaCie D2 where I make a daily clone of the iBook's internal drive with Retrospect (backup utility). This way, whenever my iBook craps out I can immediately boot from the clone and life goes on.

Unfortunately my iBook saga has brought me to this state of affairs.

BTW - I wouldn't invest any money in an old iBook. The new ones are affordable enough. I am saying this because if you are talking about putting a new drive into your current iBook, you will spend way more money than you should on a machine that probably has no warranty and will cost proportionally more to repair in any instance than it would to replace. Besides, if it's a logic board problem, your drive could be OK. Your data needs to be transferred for safety, but your drive may remain the same.


Let me know if I can be helpful to you in any way

iBook Jonz Veteran

Manca

When our iBook died we took it to the Apple Store and they backed up some important info for us. My wife explained how she had finals the next week (this was a saturday night) so the Mac Genius guy found the files with his PowerBook and burned them to a CD for us.
That's my suggestion - "can't someone else do it?"
haha... sorry, bad simpsons quote.

We dropped our iBook off on Saturday night and had it the next Friday. Good luck with yours.

When I took my iBook in with a bad logic board they offered to back up the hard drive for $50. I declined. Luckily I had backups because they also replaced the hard drive.

Do you have any warranty remaining on the iBook? Opening it and replacing the hard drive will void any warranty you have.

Personally, I'd wait until the computer comes back from Apple before changing anything.

I agree about target disk mode. Give that a try. Otherwise you'd need to buy an enclosure.

target disk mode did not work on mine but the data was still there when i got it back it's just a disclaimer incase they screw up