From: Milton Aupperle <milton@outcastsoft.com>

Date: May 17, 2008 9:17:07 AM MDT

To: Astro_IIDC@yahoogroups.com

Subject: Re: [Astro_IIDC] Sorta OT: Powerbook G4 won't startup

Hi Tim;

On 17-May-08, at 9:03 AM, Tim wrote:

Sorry for the OT post, but I'm stumped.

My powerbook G4 has "always" been a little troublesome. It seems I've

had only 3 Macs between work and home use since 1984 that have had

puzzling, if infrequent, problems.

All three have periodically had the dreaded message "you need to

restart by holding down the power button for several seconds" come up.

This had been happening to me with the powerbook on about a weekly

basis, so I took it in to an Apple service store for repairs. Problem

never went away, though it was less frequent.

2 nights ago, it happened again (after a few months of no problems).

I used to be able to restart the machine by holding down the power

button to turn it off, then restarting it. It would take up to

several minutes to restart, but seemed to be okay after that.

It does a bunch of diagnostic stuff when this happens, like Ram checking which takes longer time to re-boot.

But this time, when I restart the computer, I get the gray screen with

the apple logo and the spinning gizmo for about a minute or two, then

the computer shuts itself down. No "folder with a question mark"

icon. It just won't boot up at all.

I haven't tried putting a system disk in the DVD drive yet, but I have

tried starting it as a "target" drive with a firewire cable connected

to my mini so I could run disk utility on it. When I do that, I get a

message that it can't be repaired.

It sounds like your Drive has died. The DVD re-boot will tell you which it is as if it's the CPU / Motherboard, then you likely won't be able to boot.

Also have Disk Utilities look at the drive and see what SMART status indicates (should be verified). I had similar behavior when my drive packed it in in my G4 Laptop, 3 months after I bought it.

The other possibility is the PRAM battery is bad / dying, which causes all sorts of weird behavior too, like not finding startup disks.

Milton J. Aupperle

President

ASC - Aupperle Services and Contracting

Mac Software (Drivers, Components and Application) Specialist

#1005 - 815 14th Avenue. S.W.

Calgary Alberta T2R0N5

1-(403)-229-9456

milton@outcastsoft.com