SOLVED: PowerBook boots to black screen

Sounds hopeless, but worth a shot.

It's a PowerBook G4, 15" model A1046, and this is what's going on.

Powers on, checks combo drive, gongs, no flickering or lighting on screen, period.

Tried a PRAM reset several times but it NEVER gongs a second time. I tried booting to Open Firmware and typing mac-boot, blind, but nothing. The keyboard clearly works, as the caps lock light works.

The hard drive spins up, the fans run at normal speeds, so everything else is clearly functional.

I'll plug it up to an external display when I find an S-Video cable. (If I remember correct, it's right next to my Laserdisc player in 1997.)

Once it starts up and gongs, it does nothing more. I have no way of knowing what's going on because it won't reboot after "mac-reboot" command or respond at all to a PRAM reset.

I solved the issue! I wrote about it in my blog, if you need a hand.

Up til recently, I lost my email and login for this user. Your requests ended up in the great dev/null in the sky...

OK, I'm not a scammer. At one point I had a blog and at one point the post was in that blog. Receiving messages almost literally every day with people crying that I somehow owe them an answer was really, really aggravating.

So, to the issue at hand:

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If your PowerBook has a black screen and the sleep indicator is on, you either have a narcoleptic Mac or logic board issues. There are too many posts about NAPS, so use the search and somebody will have answered your questions.

As for the PowerBook that had no indicator, I shut the laptop down and did a PMU and PRAM reset. With the laptop powered off, I then press the power button and immediately close the lid and leave it for five minutes. When I opened it, the display was alight with a glory like that of an angels slick waxed bottom.
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If this doesn't solve your problem, I regret that I can't help more.

Wow, I got more emails about this than any other issue besides iBook GPU's...