PowerBook G3 completely dead?

[SirJ]

Hey everyone.

My friend donated me a powerbook g3 (bronze keyboard) with panther installed. After working fine (albeit a tad slow) it suddnely stopped working. As in no boot, cd drive won't open, nothing. When I turn it on it has one of those circles with the slash through them.

I'm pretty sure this isn't supposed to happen so is there anything I can do? I don't have a whole lot of use for it I've been trying to teach my self some programming in the terminal but use my touch or PC for other work, but it'd be nice to have that back.

Any suggestions?

 

[risenphoenixkai]

Hey everyone.

My friend donated me a powerbook g3 (bronze keyboard) with panther installed. After working fine (albeit a tad slow) it suddnely stopped working. As in no boot, cd drive won't open, nothing. When I turn it on it has one of those circles with the slash through them.

I'm pretty sure this isn't supposed to happen so is there anything I can do? I don't have a whole lot of use for it I've been trying to teach my self some programming in the terminal but use my touch or PC for other work, but it'd be nice to have that back.

Any suggestions?

It sounds like the hard drive has gone bad. This same thing happened to me a few times on an old PowerBook G3, and it was a failing hard drive that brought it on.

You can manually open the CD tray. There's a small depression on the side that has a latch you can press with a paper clip or something similarly small, and that will open the CD tray. From there, you should be able to boot the computer using an OS X install disc. Once it boots up off the disc, you should be able to run Disk Utility to try and repair the disk.

If Disk Utility can't repair the disk, you are probably looking at a dead hard drive. On the plus side, you can probably get a decently-sized hard drive for that old PowerBook for about $20, and they're very easy to swap out.

 

[SirJ]

thanks for your quick response but I think there might be some other things wrong. I have tried the manual open but it doesn't work. Seriously it won't open at all.
Also I can't hold the power button down to turn it off I have to pull out the battery.