iBook G4 & Failing HD

Hello everyone,

I have an iBook G4 @ 800 Mhz, Bluetooth, Airport Extreme, 640 Mb of Ram (128 Mb onboard, 512 Mb Apple brand) and a 30 Gb standart HD which has worked flawlessly for the past 18 months. I have Mac OS 10.4.2 installed with all the latest patches.

About one month ago, it began to show a strange behaviour when restarted. Sometimes it restarted OK (loading OS X), but others it kept showing an Open Firmware animation showing there's no Disk to boot from (folder with ?, folder with Mac icon).

Two weeks later, my iBook started to do this even when doing a cold boot (after a night off) and only one in 5-10 times it loaded 10.4.2, and after some minutes of normal behaviour after loading the OS, it freezed with no aparent reason.

I then tried to boot from an external firewire HD I have for Backups with a 10.3.9 install, and it did work for some time (it booted fine and worked well) until I had to access the internal HD, time in which the computer did freeze.

I then read about HD and Logic board failures, and tried a last attempt with a new 60 Gb 5400 rpm HD I bought (thinking it was the HD fault). I installed it in my iBook G4 and it worked fine for about 3 hours (installing 10.4 and configuring it), until my iBook started to show the same strange behaviour (once installed the OS and running).

What I've tried now is to run this iBook without an internal HD, and boot from an external 2,5" HD Firewire case. With this configuration, both HDs (old 30 Gb and new 60 Gb) work without a hitch and the iBook shows no sign of malfunction.

My question is: Is my iBook G4 suffering from a really faulty Logic Board or can this strange behaviour be caused by another thing that I've missed??????

Thanks in advance and excuse me if it's a long exposition, but I wanted to give all the available information...

giffut said:

... whatever reason it might be a broken cable, too. I had similar problems when my internal optical drive cable got severed.

As you seem to be familiar opening the iBook, check whether the cable is plugged in correctly on the motherboard and on the HD side or if you can spot any sort of damage to it.

Maybe the cable just got loose and you didn´t recognize it firsthand.

Click to expand...

Thank you, I'll see if the HD cable has any damage or it's bad connected.

The iBook passed OK all the tests of the Hardware Analysis CD, so it would be possible that the IDE cable is the one causing all these problems...

And yes... I'm familiar with the innards of my iBook G4