Member Avatar for sfpaul

When I press the on button on my powerbook, it makes the normal chime, goes to the white screen with no apple icon and no spinning spokes.... and doesn't go past that.

I inserted the original boot CD and held the C key down when booting. The apple icon comes up but no spinning spokes. The apple icon moves over to the right and few pixels go dark and it freezes.

When I boot the Mac and hold down the option key, I get the screen to choose the boot device, but there are no devices. The mouse moves the cursor around, but after a while with the hands on the wristwatch icon spinning, it times out and freezes.

Looks like none of the ATA bus can be accessed. What's wrong with it?

I've tried resetting the PRAM, NVRAM, and the PMU.

Thanks.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by John A
Member Avatar for John A

Definitely sounds like some sort of hard drive problem. Could the controller be dead? One thing you could still try is downloading Ubuntu PowerPC live CD (www.ubuntu.org), and then booting from that. It doesn't need a hard drive, so if it doesn't boot, then you know it's not a hard-drive related problem.

If Ubuntu does boot, then you should run some checks to make sure other hardware is alright.

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