PowerBook G4 Woes....

[Goftrey]

I was on my PowerBook G4 Titanium, surfing the web perfectly fine last night. I woke up this morning, and it would get stuck in a startup loop. The little spinning gear would come up, spin around for about 5 minutes then restart. I'd also get the odd kernel panic. So I put the Tiger install disk in they drive to try and get the ting back on it's feet, but the installer keeps failing. So I tried installing Jaguar (grey disk) and the same thing happened.

I'm a bit stumped on what to do here. Is it any good for parts or is there something I can do to get it working again?

Thanks.

 

[AdrianK]

I've had the spinning gear thing before after screwing around with the partitions on my boot HDD, but it was fixed with a complete wipe and reinstall. It's unlikely that both discs are bad.

Have you tried deletion all partitions, repartitioning then installing? If that's still failing then your hard drive is on the way out.

 

[SmurfBoxMasta]

A kernel panic means that your OS is wacked.

An OS installer failing & not being able to boot from the install disk means either your HDD and/or optical drive, and/or your install disks is/are kaput......

Are you holding down the "C" or option keys while booting with the install disk in the drive ? If you can get it to boot from the install disk, launch disk utility & try to repair permissions & the HDD, & if necessary, reformat & reinstall as Adrian said....

good luck

 

[Macman45]

This could be faulty RAM....I doubt that all your hardware died overnight. Run a memory check.

 

[Goftrey]

This could be faulty RAM....I doubt that all your hardware died overnight. Run a memory check.

Just did a memory check and the RAM's A okay.

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A kernel panic means that your OS is wacked.

An OS installer failing & not being able to boot from the install disk means either your HDD and/or optical drive, and/or your install disks is/are kaput......

Are you holding down the "C" or option keys while booting with the install disk in the drive ? If you can get it to boot from the install disk, launch disk utility & try to repair permissions & the HDD, & if necessary, reformat & reinstall as Adrian said....

good luck

I'm seriously worried it's the hard drive. It seems the most likely cause at the moment. I've tried to repair permissions & the HDD, but it says it's all good and nothing necessary is needed to be done.

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I've had the spinning gear thing before after screwing around with the partitions on my boot HDD, but it was fixed with a complete wipe and reinstall. It's unlikely that both discs are bad.

Have you tried deletion all partitions, repartitioning then installing? If that's still failing then your hard drive is on the way out.

I've haven't partitioned anything so I can't see it being that... It seems like it's the hard drive....

 

[WG81402]

Sounds like a bum hard drive. I had a 1.07GHz iBook G4 that acted the same way. It was literally an overnight thing. Replaced the HD and reinstalled OS X, and it was fine afterwards.

 

[Goftrey]

Sounds like a bum hard drive. I had a 1.07GHz iBook G4 that acted the same way. It was literally an overnight thing. Replaced the HD and reinstalled OS X, and it was fine afterwards.

A friend has offered me a 40gb drive from an old PowerBook that doesn't work any more, I'm off to pick it up in a minute so I'll have a go at reinstalling OS X on there. I've only got Jaguar and Tiger disks so, Tiger will have to do if it does work...

 

[Goftrey]

Just picked up the drive and stuck it in, I've successfully installed Tiger on it and we're all back to normality! So it was a kaput hard drive.

Thanks for the answers and suggestions everyone