G4 Powerbook Dead, First Sreen Comes Up - That's It Options

[aportman]

I have G4 PowerBook, which appears to be booting up fine at first,with the initial gray screen background and the apple in the middle comes up, but that is far as it get. It never boots any further than that. The secondary blue screen will never appear, nor willl the little retangular box appear in which the blue bar fills when loading. Ever since upgrading to Mac OSX Tiger, I have had chronic problems, with it probably locking up over 30 times in a 4 month period. I have maintained all the latest fiixes as they came out. Nothing I can do to get past the gray/green screen. I have tried every key-control, shutting down and attempting multiple hard-boots, to no avail. I am thnking that maybe my hard-drive has crashed. If you have any suggestions or thouhgts, I would greatly appreciate some direction in this area. Thanks!


Allen Portman

[AlexeyMohr]

Unfortunately it definitely sounds like your hard drive is on the way out. First things first, try to salvage any data that you can. Your best bet for this is "Target Disk Mode," where you essentially turn your computer into a firewire disk.

You do this by holding the "T" key at startup until you see a yellow firewire logo bouncing around the screen. You then connect your computer to another with a firewire cable, and your hard drive should pop up on the other comptuer's desktop.

At this point you should be able to copy over data. Get your users folder!!

Lastly, try completely erasing your hard drive and re-installing OSX Tiger. If issues persist, you'll definitely be in need of a new hard drive. And unless you're quite comfortable with tearing apart your powerbook, I highly recommend getting it done professionally.