Dead Powerbook - Drive or Logic Board?

[MediaRight]

My main computer died in the middle of our family California vacation; hope some of you hardware guys can help.

What's happening is that it's a 1.5 ghz 2004 make PowerBook G4 with a 70 or 80 gb drive (not sure which). The problem is that on boots, it displays a grey sceen. That's it. For a while we could coax it into booting after 3 or 4 power downs. After a random immediate shutdown, it booted to the white apple screen for a split second, then kernel panic'ed. It continued to do that for the rest of that night. Now, it just shows the grey screen on boot-ups. The machine also gave me a kernel panic on boot right after a clean install of Leopard when the OS came out last October. During one of our attempted boot-ups the night of the kernal panic, the machine briefly emitted a long tone before booting to the panic.

At the apple Store on the road, they tried booting to a firewire drive, and at the drive selection screen, it froze. Because of that, they think it's a shot logic board. I told all of this to a friend of mine that night, and he said it could be the drive instead and that the frozen drive selection screen was because it was trying to analyze and recognize the main HD unsuccessfully. The Genius Bar did NOT try to boot from a CD. I'll try that when I get back to Atlanta. The machine, will, however, boot into open firmware.

So the question is...drive or logic board?

[dtravis7]

This is of course a guess as I have seen it both ways.

I would say Hard Drive because of how it started to first mess up. If the Hard Drive is really messed up, sometimes it will freeze like that at the Boot selection screen. I know it's not easy, but you could be sure if you can take out the internal Hard Drive and then try it with an external or even the OSX DVD.

Good luck. Do you have your OSX DVD? If so what happens if you try to boot from that with C held down after the startup sound? Does it still freeze?

[Rxx]

When my HD failed, it had a very similar start up. Just that grey start up screen after the initial chime noise. And then nothing. However, after a few (by that I mean probably 10) start ups and shut downs I eventually got to the picture of a folder with a "?" which pretty much sealed the deal as far as the HD being the problem. But the simple grey screen did show at first. However no kernal panics or anything of that sort.

[MacHeadCase]

Well if it is the HD that's gone to HD heaven, the simple test you could try to see if the HD is the culprit is to use the OS X DVD like trav says. That'll tell you right away if it is the logic board.

[Sherman Homan]

The kernel panic and the long tone suggest a ram problem. Now, it could be that the mobo is blown and isn't recognizing a good ram chip, but I would bet on a bad ram chip.

[MediaRight]

Yeah, I'll be trying a CD/DVD boot once I'm back in ATL tonight as I said above.

[MacHeadCase]

Sherman has an interesting take on it maybe being RAM related, though. Is the RAM all factory installed or did you add some?

Of course, that doesn't mean anything either, I've seen people have the factory installed RAM go bad! It doesn't happen too many times but it does happen.

[Automatic]

Just to add.. My macbook continues to have the same symptoms as OP. It happens more sporadically then what you have been experiencing. I dont believe its harddrive in my case because I have had no problems with data writes, reads, copies, moves etc. Im thinking about the ram being the problem. Is there a good memory tester for os x?