Hi there!
Some time ago, I was given a beautiful iBook G3 with 800MHz processor. It is in pretty good visual condition, but I had been told it was totally broken. However, when turned on it started to boot but couldn't finish and I could hear the hard drive clicking. I took out the hard drive and tested it with a x86 PC and MHDD - there were more bad sectors than good ones(likely a head crash).
So I installed a spare hard drive, which was in better condition but had some relocated sectors already and then managed to successfully install an operating system from original CD-s.
At that point I noticed the first problem with the notebook - sometimes, when I changed the angle of its screen lid, the backlight turned off and wouldn't turn on until the computer was rebooted. It was only the backlight, as in good light it was possible to see the picture. But it wasn't very disturbing issue, so I didn't do anything with that.
Then, I thought it would be nice to upgrade OS X to Tiger. I installed a 512MB memory module, so that I had 640MB of RAM in my iBook. However, it was hardly usable. It booted for a long time and it took forever to open anything. I saw a video of Tiger running on a Clamshell iBook and it wasn't like that! I also tried clean install - it didn't make any difference, only the setup took less time.
So then I thought the hard drive might be dying again and I purchased a SD to ATA adapter from Aliexpress, and a 32GB card. I knew that the setup wouldn't last forever but the iBook wouldn't be my everyday machine, so I went for it anyway. So, the problem looks like that:
1. After installing the adapter, the notebook doesn't want to boot from CD. The "eject cd" command in Open Firmware works, though.
2. I installed the original Mac OS X 10.2 from the second partition on the SD card(I made an image of my original CD and restored it with Disk Utility on another machine using USB card reader).
3. The iBook boots Mac OS X, but when I insert any CD, it either crashes or just doesn't detect anything.
4. Opening the System Profiler also causes a kernel panic.
5. I managed to install Mac OS 9 from the Software Restore CD using an USB optical drive.
6. On Mac OS 9, the internal drive works just fine, and opening System Profiler doesn't crash anything. It detects all the hardware(including the internal optical drive) without any problem.
So, my question is, did anyone have similar problems? Is it just that the iBook doesn't like the SD to ATA adapter or is there a problem with the logic board?
What is interesting, I have tested the adapter with x86 laptops, with exactly the same card and it works perfectly.
Also sorry that my first post here is a request for help. I hope You won't mind that
Some time ago, I was given a beautiful iBook G3 with 800MHz processor. It is in pretty good visual condition, but I had been told it was totally broken. However, when turned on it started to boot but couldn't finish and I could hear the hard drive clicking. I took out the hard drive and tested it with a x86 PC and MHDD - there were more bad sectors than good ones(likely a head crash).
So I installed a spare hard drive, which was in better condition but had some relocated sectors already and then managed to successfully install an operating system from original CD-s.
At that point I noticed the first problem with the notebook - sometimes, when I changed the angle of its screen lid, the backlight turned off and wouldn't turn on until the computer was rebooted. It was only the backlight, as in good light it was possible to see the picture. But it wasn't very disturbing issue, so I didn't do anything with that.
Then, I thought it would be nice to upgrade OS X to Tiger. I installed a 512MB memory module, so that I had 640MB of RAM in my iBook. However, it was hardly usable. It booted for a long time and it took forever to open anything. I saw a video of Tiger running on a Clamshell iBook and it wasn't like that! I also tried clean install - it didn't make any difference, only the setup took less time.
So then I thought the hard drive might be dying again and I purchased a SD to ATA adapter from Aliexpress, and a 32GB card. I knew that the setup wouldn't last forever but the iBook wouldn't be my everyday machine, so I went for it anyway. So, the problem looks like that:
1. After installing the adapter, the notebook doesn't want to boot from CD. The "eject cd" command in Open Firmware works, though.
2. I installed the original Mac OS X 10.2 from the second partition on the SD card(I made an image of my original CD and restored it with Disk Utility on another machine using USB card reader).
3. The iBook boots Mac OS X, but when I insert any CD, it either crashes or just doesn't detect anything.
4. Opening the System Profiler also causes a kernel panic.
5. I managed to install Mac OS 9 from the Software Restore CD using an USB optical drive.
6. On Mac OS 9, the internal drive works just fine, and opening System Profiler doesn't crash anything. It detects all the hardware(including the internal optical drive) without any problem.
So, my question is, did anyone have similar problems? Is it just that the iBook doesn't like the SD to ATA adapter or is there a problem with the logic board?
What is interesting, I have tested the adapter with x86 laptops, with exactly the same card and it works perfectly.
Also sorry that my first post here is a request for help. I hope You won't mind that
