iBook G3 won't start-up

Hi all,

I'm having a frustrating problem with my G3 iBook - as with many other posters, it won't start-up at all. I have tried the shift-ctrl-option-power sequence, without any luck.

Some history - this is not the first time I have had the problem. The first time was about 2 months ago, whilst I was playing a game, having booted in MacOS9. The game froze during a loading operation, and I had to shutdown the computer. Having done a forced shutdown (power for 10 secs), the computer would not restart. I tried all of the usual fixes listed in article 14449, without any luck. Eventually, after having left the iBook unplugged for about a month, I tried to restart it, and it started just fine, except that the pram had been reset (date reset to 1904 etc...). The computer ran fine for about a week, in both OS X and OS 9, but the, I tried to run the game again, and once again it froze during a loading operation (not the same as previously...) Same result, nothing works to make the computer reboot.

The fact that the computer worked just fine again, and failed again doing the sme type of operation suggests to me that firstly there is a bug in the game, and that secondly there is probably nothing physically wrong with the computer, it's just that a pram setting has been scrambled so that the computer won't restart any more.

Is there any other way of resetting the power manager and/or pram on an iBook G3 800 MHz? Or is there another reset that might be applicable? Or is there something else that might be causing the problem?

Anyway, any help anyone can give me would be greatly appreciated. I don't want to have to wait a month for the charge to fade enough that whatever setting is scrambled resets...