G4 PBK gray screen at startup, nothing else

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Level 1

6 points

G4 PBK gray screen at startup, nothing else

For the past few days myPB on OSX10.4.11 has been starting up with difficulty, at times taking an hour before anything happens, but often giving me the alternating Finder face/question mark in a folder. I was able to get a last gasp of activity and updated my Seagate portable drive using Carbon Cloner. I have scoured this site for possible solutions but nothing seems to work. Unfortunately, this is a second owner PB and I do not have the startup disk or a repair disk. I tried holding the c anod pushing the start button: I got a whirring hard disk slung, then a 4 second tone, then the musical chord, then gray screen. I cannot get to any other functions now. I did see something about connecting to another computer....I do have an iMac also on 10.4.11' so can I connect the PB to the iMac with an Ethernet cable to run tests?

PowerBook, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Dec 22, 2014 8:45 AM

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Answer 1

bob.c Author

Level 1

6 points

Dec 22, 2014 6:00 PM in response to bob.c

Update : After powering up while holding the option key, I got open firmware and it said to type Mac-boot and enter. This resulted in a gray page with spinning windmill, then black screen with this at the top: local host:/ root# . If I hit enter, nothing happens. Any suggestions?

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

239,159 points

Dec 25, 2014 12:03 PM in response to bob.c

Hi Bob,

Things to try...

Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes.

(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive & clear caches.)

Does it boot to Single User Mode, CMD+s keys at bootup, if so try...

/sbin/fsck -fy

Repeat until it shows no errors fixed.

(Space between fsck AND -fy important).

http://www.westwind.com/reference/os-x/commandline/single-user.html

I do have an iMac also on 10.4.11' so can I connect the PB to the iMac with an Ethernet cable to run tests?

Do they both have Firewire???

How to use FireWire target disk mode...

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Disk_Mode

Holding t key on the PB when powering on should make the PB look like a FW drive to the iMac, where possible Repairs or Copying can be done. 🙂

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Answer 3

bob.c Author

Level 1

6 points

Dec 25, 2014 6:26 PM in response to BDAqua

hi BDAqua, thanks for the ideas. i did try the safe mode startup and left thePBk alone for a while....nothing but grey skies. And I followed the instructions for a firewire connection and boot, used Disk Utilities to check the PBk hard drive, tried both Verify and Repair, but got failure messages: drive could not dismount, and repair will not run. It is likely that the HD is dead. My local Apple guy returns in Jan and he has some ATA drives that will fit. Fortunately, the PBk aliminum's HD is easy enough to replace. I also have an iBook G4 that is sitting in the closet, waiting for a new HD, but that s another story altogether!

Any further thoughts?

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Answer 4

bob.c Author

Level 1

6 points

Jan 13, 2015 2:40 PM in response to bob.c

The PB did require a replacement hard drive and I am trying to do that right now. In fact, my new thread has started already, trying to get Tiger into the PB. Thanks for the help. bob.c

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