Sick Pismo -- any diagnoses?

[ziggy29]

This just started happening a couple months ago. I put it away for a while but wanted to look into it more now. Here's what I see lately when it tries to boot up:



And if I hit the option key while starting up:



And when I select a boot drive it thinks for a couple seconds and eventually just stops with a blank screen in the same color patterns as above.

Before I bother with it more, I wanted to see if this looks familiar to anyone and if it looks like the problem is with anything that can reasonably be replaced, or if this one is going to the "parts farm".

 

[MikeatOSX]

I have one sort of this. When pressing on some points on the sides of the display the error disappears sometimes.
I suppose, it's the display cable.
http://tim.id.au/laptops/apple/powerbook/powerbook_fw.pdf

 

[128keaton]

The Pismo LCDs are garbage, unfortunately. Try the corner pressing above.

 

[ziggy29]

Thanks for the ideas. I tried that to seemingly no avail. I think the problem is different (and perhaps worse) than that, since when I attach an external display to it I see the same type of garbled nonsense on the external display (which I know works fine). I was also able to use the sick Pismo in Target Disk Mode and used it to boot my Digital Audio and it seemed to be working fine to that extent.

So at this point, my wonderment is: Is this something fouled on the logic board itself? If it is, this thing is parts to help rebuild a potential future cheap Pismo. If it's something else that may be more replaceable, I may give it a shot.

 

[havokalien]

unscrew the keyboard and take a look. could still be the cable tho as they age, get brittle and are just sppoled around the hinge.

 

[128keaton]

Thanks for the ideas. I tried that to seemingly no avail. I think the problem is different (and perhaps worse) than that, since when I attach an external display to it I see the same type of garbled nonsense on the external display (which I know works fine). I was also able to use the sick Pismo in Target Disk Mode and used it to boot my Digital Audio and it seemed to be working fine to that extent.

So at this point, my wonderment is: Is this something fouled on the logic board itself? If it is, this thing is parts to help rebuild a potential future cheap Pismo. If it's something else that may be more replaceable, I may give it a shot.

It is sounding like a GPU issue. If you have a heat gun, might be worth it to disassemble the pismo, remove the logic board, and blow some hot air over it to get it reflowed. Or, you are looking at a logic board replacement. This guy: http://www.geektechnique.org/projectlab/726/diy-obsolete-ibook-logic-board-repair.html
did something outrageous, but it worked.

 

[MikeatOSX]

http://r.ebay.com/3KfPcI

 

[ziggy29]

I managed to pick up a barebones Pismo that boots up -- had a bad keyboard, missing the Airport card (have two replacements for those anyway) and the back plate that covers the ports was missing (also have two of each of those as well). It booted up fine, but with a bad PRAM battery. Put my G4/550 with 1 GB of RAM in to replace the G3/400 card with 256MB, put in a backup 60GB HDD with 9.2.2 and 10.4.11 already installed, swapped out the PRAM battery from my "sick" Pismo and replaced the keyboard and all is pretty much well with one exception noted below. Also got an original Apple battery that still holds about 65% of original charge in the deal, which is a bit of a bonus and probably "worth" close to what I paid for the whole thing by itself.

The only problem is that it looks like the L2 cache on the G4 card is dead. OS 9.2.2 gives me a warning dialog on startup, and looking at the system info in Tiger shows no L2 cache enabled. Can't win 'em all, but I guess this is probably still faster, at least in Tiger, than the G3/400.

 

[ziggy29]

I've actually decided to leave the G3/400 in after some working with it today (with the full 1 GB of RAM, of course). The reason is that the G4 gets hot. REAL hot. And it often throttles in Tiger, and sometimes crashes because of heat. For most things as I use them, with maxed out RAM the G3/400 is almost as fast but doesn't nearly have the same heat problem as the G4 (it's probably because of less throttling and almost no beach balls). I don't know if the broken L2 cache has anything to do with it running so hot, but for now I get a more stable and decent experience with the G3. And when I put both batteries (one I bought with the new one and the one from my sick one) I get about 9500 mAh in both bays and probably 7+ hours of run time on the batteries. So I'm happy for now, even if this thing feels like bricks with both batteries in it!

 

[bunnspecial]

PM me if you want to part with the G4 card

 

[ziggy29]

Will let you know. I think the fan might be bad in the Pismo I'm using now, which might explain things. I need to fiddle more and test with a fan that turns on once in a while.