Hey everyone, brand new here as ThinkClassic has been archived and I had to find another vintage Apple forum to see if they could help out and this was the next best place. The problem I am currently having is that my iBook G3 boots up normally, but the display is non functional. It only shows grey. It's extremely unlikely, but I was in the machine upgrading the hard drive and that could've caused something. Does anyone know how to fix this or maybe what happened? I'd be eternally grateful.
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iBook G3 Dual USB grey screen on startup
- Thread starter androidian5980
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A known issue with the white G3 iBooks (typically the 700MHz+ units) is the GPU's BGA solder can lose contact with the logic board. Try applying some pressure by squeezing the iBook with your left thumb at the underside left of the trackpad area and power it on. If you see the display come on, even momentarily, then the problem is with the logic board. You can get away with some fixes here like inserting a shim or thermal pad to apply pressure to the GPU from inside the bottom case, or some people have applied heat to the GPU chip to try re-soldering the contacts.
Another possibility, if you were inside the iBook recently, is to try reseating the display LVDS connector at the logic board. If that makes no difference, remove the display rear housing to gain access to the rear of the LCD panel and try reseating the LVDS connector at the LCD.
If that gets you nowhere, the LVDS cable may be damaged and requires replacement. I have witnessed this on my white G3 iBooks in the past. The hinge puts stress on the LVDS and WiFi antenna cables, which can result in glitching or no display image and/or poor wifi reception.
Thanks for the quick response. I tried re-seating the cable on the logic board and on the display itself, but it unfortunately didn't work. That would leave the reballing, which I have no expertise with. Would it be possible to use it as a "halftop" and just use an external display? Sounds silly I know, but I did that for a PC laptop that had a dead screen and it worked fine.
Hey there, are you sure it really boots up? It sounds crazy, but I recently bought a cheap G3 that won't show anything except the grey screen. It turned out the hard drive was bad and the Mac OS Install was corrupted, but still could be recognized by the system, so it got stuck everytime before even showing the Apple logo.
Try to boot into verbose boot. This would be ⌘ (Command) + V
If you can see the text, you know that GPU, connections and display are fine.
It does boot up with a chime and I can boot into Mac OS X. I pressed the volume keys and can hear the sounds. I think I'm gonna try a reflow of the GPU. Would there be any good way to do it without any expensive equipment?
A heat gun would do the job;
Fixing the Infamous IBook Screen Problem
Fixing the Infamous IBook Screen Problem: Some iBook G3s have the problem of their screens having lines or staying black when booting. The problem is with the graphics chip. To fix this problem we must reflow the the solder beads in the graphics chip. In this instructable I use a heat gu…
Apparently tea light candles and IPA can do the trick too;
Do yourself a favor and spend a night on Youtube before, so you get an idea of how to use a heat gun on boards. All the blogs and videos of DIY's suggest its easy doable, but honestly, for every success you see, there's 10 boards in the bin. I learned my lesson ...