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Question

Help! My PowerBook G4 won't boot after updates.

May 16, 2012 1:54AM PDT

I haven't used my PowerBook G4 15'' 1.25 GHz for a few months and turned it on today to find a number of updates needing installing (iTunes, Safari + 4 others), which I went ahead with. I was asked to reboot, which I did. The computer turned off, then on but froze on the grey apple screen, with no rotating symbol.

I've tried...

- Holding down Command-Opt-P-R while powering on.
- Holding down Shift-Ctrl-Command-Opt while powering on.
- Holding down Shift while powering on.
- Holding down Command-S while powering on.

All give the same results - the grey screen with Apple logo and silence.

Also worth noting that I don't have the Tiger disc.

Any help would be FANTASTIC!

Thanks in advance.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
What disc do you have?
May 16, 2012 2:26AM PDT

Sounds like the usual failures (HDD, etc.) so if I had this encounter I'd get the waiver signed before we swapped out the HDD to try to load up the OS again.
Bob

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Answer
How long
May 16, 2012 6:27AM PDT

How long did you let it sit? It's not common, but sometimes updates take a while to install, and Apple isn't so great at letting you know what is going on during the boot process. So how long did you wait before shutting things off? And while it's quite likely that by now you may well have corrupted the OS install, if you didn't give it at least a good 5 minutes or so, maybe 10 would be more appropriate given the age of the unit, then I'd suggest starting with that.

But I would agree that there's a strong possibility this is a HDD failure. The lack of the spinning gear means the firmware can't find the OS kernel to start the boot process. That is more often than not a sign of a bad HDD. So if you get any ideas about replacing the HDD yourself, make sure you go to a site like iFixit to read up on how to do it. Otherwise, you're going to damage the locking mechanism for the top case cable, and the only real way to fix that is a new MLB. Since it's a PPC, that means its vintage status at least, so repair options get significantly more limited. The last thing you'd want to do is end up making the situation even worse.

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(NT) IDEA? External Firewire HDD?
May 16, 2012 6:30AM PDT