PowerBook G4: Chime, white screen, fails to boot up

[J.D.M.]

Good evening,

Wow...what a wonderful time to start having problems with my Mac. I'm moving for college in the morning and I'm worried that my PowerBook is toast!!

So I was just there, using my computer, doing nothing out-of-the-ordinary. I decided to open up a program (Yahoo! Instant Messenger, I think it was) and the computer went nuts. I completely froze...nothing I tried worked. So I shut the computer down and tried rebooting it. It chimed and went to the white start-up screen with the apple...I let it sit for about ten minutes to let it restart. Still the white screen. I shut it down and tried it again. Same thing.

Is my computer dead? What might I be able to do to fix it? How much might it cost?

I really hope I won't have to buy a new computer. Thank you so much in advance for any advice you might be able to offer.

 

[rolex54]

i would say the logic board is screwed, depending on how many GHz the machine is, a replacement would likely run around $400

You should try just resetting the power management unit(PMU) and VRAM, see if that helps for some reason


it shouldn't be the hard drive because you never got a folder icon or unhappy mac face

 

[monkey86]

have a look at this 🙂

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379

 

[kitfox521]

other solution.

it has nothing to do with the PMU or VRAM. it means the sector are bad. i had the same problem but when i tried to boot from a linux CD it was successful and when i looked at the hard drive on the linux CD it said the drive was unreadable due to bad sectors. try booting from the utility disk next time or run the command line and type /sbin/fsck -fy