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ibook- strange behaviour

hrsetrdr

hrsetrdr

macrumors member
Original poster
Sep 17, 2007
64
0
Well, last night I finally received an ibook 700 G3(os x 10.3) purchased on ebay. I got it home, booted it up and the ibook all seems to work fine, for the first 5 to 10 minutes that it's running. Then, the system just stops responding. None of the icons or 'windows' will work, no keyboard response either. Only a cold shutdown will work. Once rebooted, all works fine, but again after 5 to 10 minutes, the system just ceases to respond. I thought maybe the Power Management settings were the cause, so I set everything to "never" for sleep, hibernate, etc. That didn't make any difference. I don't know if there is any kind of hardware issue, or strictly software related. On the way to work this afternoon it occurred to me to try booting to the old OS 9.** kernel, which I noticed was present.

Any thoughts?
 
First thing, did you try repairing disk permissions in the disk utility?

Second, can you track CPU-usage in activity monitor during those 5-10 mins and see if anything spikes.

You should also try booting into safe-mode and see if the problem re-occurs: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393

There are also some other tests, which I'm sure more experienced Mac-heads can fill you in on.

And finally, there is a good chance that you got a bad batch, which is what I would expect from ebay-purchases, to be honest. I hope you didn't pay too much for it.
 
Vinnie_vw said:
First thing, did you try repairing disk permissions in the disk utility?
Second, can you track CPU-usage in activity monitor during those 5-10 mins and see if anything spikes.
You should also try booting into safe-mode and see if the problem re-occurs: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393
Click to expand...

I'm new to Macs, so please forgive my blank look when certain Apple related terminology is mentioned. Here's an update on where/what I've done with this ibook:


Since the cdrom is bad, and I don't have any Apple disks or utilities,I bought a 6 to 6 firewire cable, and hooked it to my <new!> Mini and the laptop. I can "see" the laptop's hard drive, and browse the directories therein. OS 9 system, System Folder, Applications(Mac OS9) and theMac OS 9 Desktop link are all there. No sign of OS X 10.3.9 at all. So, the hard drive functions, the file system appears to be intact; how can it be made to boot to, at boot time? I tried to modify the "start up disk preferences" under /system folder/preferences, but was denied permission. Are there any configs(or utilities) in OpenFirmware that I can do/need to be done that would help? OpenFirmware is somewhat similar to my old Sparc's OpenBoot enviornment, and as such, I suspect that a specific drive or partition can be set for boot. Since I reset the PRAM & PMU, are there parameters I need to re-enter, to enable OS boot?
 
use "startup disk" in the mini's preferences to change to the iBook HD. Or re-start the mini with the iBook still connected to it in T-mode while holding the option key and select the iBook.

edit: you might not be able to to this with a G3, I forget.
 
try booting into single user mode (hold command+s at starup till you see white text on black)

then type in:

fsck -f

INCLUDE the space!!!

that'll run a check/minor repair to any damaged sectors of the hard drive
 
FJ218700 said:
Or re-start the mini with the iBook still connected to it in T-mode while holding the option key and select the iBook.
Click to expand...

That technique made me a bit leery at first, but the more I think about it, it sounds "do-able". I bought a set of disks off ebay last night(OS9.2~OS X10.3); when they get here I'll try that.

sbluetruck said:
try booting into single user mode (hold command+s at starup till you see white text on black)

then type in:

fsck -f

INCLUDE the space!!!

that'll run a check/minor repair to any damaged sectors of the hard drive
Click to expand...

I did try that,no luck...wouldn't even get the blinking ? just the grey screen. ???
 
This happens to my iBook too. I've tried to reinstall OSX and changing the thermal grease at the CPU. After I changed the thermal grease the iBook worked for about one week, with fewer freezes, but now it occurs as I log in to OSX. :(
 
23am said:
This happens to my iBook too. I've tried to reinstall OSX and changing the thermal grease at the CPU. After I changed the thermal grease the iBook worked for about one week, with fewer freezes, but now it occurs as I log in to OSX. :(
Click to expand...

Thanks for mentioning the thermal grease, I should do that also, when I disassemble this ibook(again), probably tomorrow.
 
hrsetrdr said:
Thanks for mentioning the thermal grease, I should do that also, when I disassemble this ibook(again), probably tomorrow.
Click to expand...

My iBook seems to work pretty well at safe boot. I'm trying that right now, and it has been idle for about one hour now. I just started playing music over AirTunes, so we'll see how it works now..
 
It still seems to work without any significant problems.
The only problem I have now is that Safe Boot turns off Airport, sound, USB Overdrive and SideTrack.
 
My guess is a bad video card, you probably need to get the motherboard replaced.

This happened to my iBook G4 3 times. The video card went bad and it would freeze up like you say, but in safe boot mode it didn't load any video acceleration drivers and hence didn't freeze.

So to me it seems like the same exact issue as mine.
 
Today was a do or die day for this laptop....if no significant progress was made today, it would have likely gotten parted out and auctioned off.

She's a keeper! I re-shimmed the onboard video chip, put the new cdrom in, and successfully installed Ubuntu 6.10(ppc). Ubuntu properly detected and installed the correct driver for the Airport card. So far, so good; no sign of any video anomalies.

For a little relaxation, I dropped in the 2gigs of RAM(for the Mini) that arrived today. :D

Take a look!
 
Here's my dmesg output to terminal,

Code: 
hrsetrdr@hrsetrdr-laptop:~$ dmesg
[    0.000000] Using PowerMac machine description
[    0.000000] Total memory = 256MB; using 512kB for hash table (at cff80000)
[    0.000000] Linux version 2.6.17-10-powerpc (root@ross) (gcc version 4.1.2 20060928 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.1-13ubuntu5)) #2 Fri Oct 13 16:37:41 UTC 2006 (Ubuntu 2.6.17-10.33-powerpc)
[    0.000000] Found initrd at 0xc1900000:0xc1f52000
                                [COLOR="Blue"][I]*Edited for length*[/I][/COLOR]
[   55.309754] orinoco 0.15rc3 (David Gibson <hermes@gibson.dropbear.id.au>, Pavel Roskin <proski@gnu.org>, et al)
[   55.323631] [COLOR="Red"]airport 0.15rc3 [/COLOR](Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>)
[   55.323770] airport: Physical address 80030000
[   56.527931] eth1: Hardware identity 0005:0001:0001:0002
[   56.528046] eth1: Station identity  001f:0001:0008:0046
[COLOR="Red"][   56.528056] eth1: Firmware determined as Lucent/Agere 8.70[/COLOR]
[   56.528061] eth1: Ad-hoc demo mode supported
[   56.528067] eth1: IEEE standard IBSS ad-hoc mode supported
[   56.528072] eth1: WEP supported, 104-bit key
[   56.528145] eth1: MAC address 00:30:65:14:2B:E9
[   56.528230] eth1: Station name "HERMES I"
[   56.528659] eth1: ready
[   56.528898] airport: Card registered for interface eth1
[   58.094135] eth1: New link status: Connected (0001)
[   58.727286] input: PowerMac Beep as /class/input/input4
[   58.788606] NET: Registered protocol family 17
[   59.260140] apm_emu: APM Emulation 0.5 initialized.

Hope this helps.
 
There have been very big problems with Airport in Ubuntu before, because it use to be a Broadcom card in it. Broadcoms source codes is closed..
In PC's you can use the Windows drivers via ndiswrapper, but it does not work with OSX's drivers.
 
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