HELP: Tiger won't boot anymore!

[Zim Bargo]

I installed Tiger about a month ago, and so far haven't had any major problems... until now!

Everything was fine until yesterday, when I decided to plug my iPod in for a quick battery boost. Unplugged it 1/2 hour later (possibly without ejecting it) and now everything is up the spout.

I have to hard restart (?) but nothing I do will allow me to boot up. I have a PB 1.25 GHz and saved the whole hard drive onto a backup drive (Miglia 320G dual disk) before installing Tiger (which I did as an archive install). I've tried holding down the option key when starting up and selecting my backup drive to boot from, but again no luck. I do get slightly further down the line this time though. Whereas when trying to boot from my hard drive I can only get as far as the white screen with the Apple logo, when trying boot from Panther on the external drive it seems like it is all going to work but gets as far as 'looking for or verifying local drives' and then gets stuck.

No idea what else to try so any advice would be appreciated before I try doing a clean install - not that it sounds like that will help if I can't even boot from my external drive.

Had thought maybe something had gone wrong with my hard drive, but it sounds like it is starting up when I first start the process.

Thanks for any help

Zim

 

[Krazykrl]

Try holding down the Option ket when you restart, you should see a blue screen appear. This will show you all available boot volumes. Plug your external drive in before you do this in case you can choose to boot from it.

If this does not work, there may be something physically wrong with the Mac.

 

[ChrisFromCanada]

Is the copy of panther bootable on your external drive?

do you have the original disks that came with your pb so you can run the hardware test?

 

[Zim Bargo]

Bit of an update:

I've tried the option trick on start up and selected my Panther drive. This looked like it was going to work for a minute, until it got stuck while 'looking for' or 'verifying local files' - I forget the exact wording.

I've since tried re-installing Tiger (insert disk and hold down C when restarting I think). This was going fine for the first few screens until it came to 'select a drive' on which to install. My hard drive didn't appear for me to select, which has led to me thinking that my hard disk is screwed.

I called Apple this morning and, although it wasn't the smoothest process speaking to someone in India without a full grasp of the English language who, rather than being a technician, seemed to be scrolling through a computer programme and just asking whichever question appeared on screen, I've been advised to try resetting the PRAM - she didn't however know what this did or if it would allow my computer to re-find my hard drive.

I don't have Apple care and my PB is only 1 1/2 years old so really don't think my hard drive should have quit on me now - anyone know how much it might cost to get it fixed (assuming the PRAM solution doesn't work - and I'm not holding out much hope, even though I still don't know what it does)

Thanks for any other thoughts / advice / help

Zim

 

[Krazykrl]

I would call Apple back to speak to a different rep. I have always had luck with Apple support (which is not based in India, most are English-speaking) maybe you just got the new guy or something.

As for cost, this depends on how much work is involved in replacing the drive. I don't have a new Powerbook, but the last Powerbook I did have (Pismo) the hard drive was right under the keyboard and it was a piece of cake to replace.

My iBook however, was a nightmare, and I had it in a thousand pieces. I did it tho.