ibook g4 won't go past gray screen, hard drive making whirirng noises

Question

ibook g4 won't go past gray screen, hard drive making whirirng noises

I think I'm in pretty serious trouble here...

I left my 2-yr old ibook g4 running last night downloading a couple of torrents, and woke up in the middle of the night because it was making a loud whirring noise. I tried to close everything, but found that it was frozen. So I just powered it off. I've never had it freeze on me, or otherwise had any problems with it before.

When I turned it on this morning, it would make the initial startup chime, but would not go past the grey screen with the apple. I tried several times, with a couple of slightly different results. The first time I got the apple with the circle underneath. The second time, I got no apple, but the circle with a line through it. And the final time, its just been the apple. And all the while, the hard drive is making a really ill sounding whirr.

I read another post about trying to boot from the install CD, so I inserted the CD & pressed c, but nothing happens, and now the CD won't eject.

Is it possible that it overheated? I got an e-mail about the battery recall, but according to my serial number, mine wasn't one that was being recalled.

Please help!

iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

iBook G4, Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Posted on Nov 8, 2006 4:37 PM

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Answer 1

Nov 9, 2006 8:17 AM in response to rosie_camacho

Haven't had any replies yet, but I do have some progress to report...

I was able to eject the Panther Install CD1 after all (pressed the eject button immediately after I powered on). Have tried booting from it a couple of times, to no avail. I was, however, able to boot it from my friend's Tiger Install DVD. I went into Disk Utility, as I have read elsewhere and tried to repair my hard disk using that, but got the following error:

"Repair disk failed. Could not unmount disk"

Probably a stupid question, but is it because its not the correct operating system?

I still don't know why it won't boot from my Panther CD.

I have tried to boot in Safe Mode, but all I get is a little folder icon that alternately flashes the finder icon & a question mark.

I purchased my ibook online when I was still living in Canada, but its no longer under warranty and I didn't purchase the protection plan. I am currently living in rural Japan, with absolutely no Apple Stores anywhere remotely close to where I am.

I've also seen elsewhere that I could probably just get a new hard drive, which is fine as I could use the extra space anyway, but does this mean I lose everything that's on my current hard drive??

If anyone has any suggestions, it'd much appreciated!

iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.3.9)

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Answer 2

Nov 9, 2006 9:47 PM in response to rosie_camacho

This sort of sounds like a bug I've had before. When I took it to a repair shop (Apple certified) they pretty much said it was the hard drive. I would guess you'll probably need a new hard drive. I'm not really the greatest at figuring things out, but a friend of mine said there was some way, if you had another Mac and a firewire cord, that you could attempt to mount the iBook's hard drive onto another mac?

I'm not sure on this one or if it's even a possibility, but your hard drive errors sound like mine when my hard drive was failing. And I'm still having weird errors with it.

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Answer 3

Nov 9, 2006 11:06 PM in response to Courtney Mohland

Ah, here it is. If you have another mac available for you to use, try this:

Run target disk mode

1. Connect firewire cable (ibook to another firewire capable mac)
2. Restart iBook holding down the T key
3. Firewire symbol appears on iBook screen
4. iBook disk appears on other desktop
5. Transfer files

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Answer 4

Nov 12, 2006 6:59 PM in response to Courtney Mohland

Yeah, I tried booting to Target mode, with no luck.

Just gonna install a new one and hopefully be able to recover the data from the old one. My boyfriend says he should be able to recover about 85%.

Thanks for your help.

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Answer 5

Nov 14, 2006 5:34 AM in response to rosie_camacho

Thanks for your reply 🙂

I went ahead and ordered a new 120GB 5200RMB Seagate HD (and T8 torx screwdriver!), plus a firewire hard drive enclosure.

I'll post back to let y'all know how it goes & how much, if any, data I was able to recover.

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Answer 6

Nov 14, 2006 5:39 AM in response to rosie_camacho

Thanks for your reply 🙂

I went ahead and ordered a new 120GB 5200RMB Seagate HD (and T8 torx screwdriver!), plus a firewire hard drive enclosure.

I'll post back to let y'all know how it goes & how much, if any, data I was able to recover.

Apparently, I may have been taxing my HD more than the average user, what with all the TV shows & movies I'd been downloading via Bit Torrent (rural Japan + no cable TV = download fiend). Because of the way BT downloads little pieces of files all over the place, the HD "arm" is constantly moving around as it writes files. Guess its back to Limewire for me!

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