yesterday my two-week switcher neighbor who owns a 12" powerbook stopped by. his powerbook had presumably died and did not boot anymore. on bootup the screen would turn garbled. after spending some time on the phone with apple on friday he had already been through the resetting-pram, fixing preferences, disk-repairs etc. all to no avail. when he came to my door he wasn't very happy. not about the broken machine, that can happen... but the prospect of being without his beloved machine for a week!
i spent two hours and got the machine to work again. there are two possible causes i think, and i'm not sure which one caused the panics. i'll try to explain, it might help someone else (and saved apple some $$$)
symptoms:
- machine hangs at random or at bootup, leaving the screen completely garbled.
- even Software Restore CD, HW test or other OSX disks don't start (couldn't try OS9)
- booting in verbose mode (holding command-v on boot) shows a kernel panic after the disk check.
cause (thesis):
- improperly flashed airport/extreme
- improperly seated airport/extreme
solution:
- i got the machine to boot properly again by removing the AE card.
- i then installed the 10.2.6 complete update
- then downloaded & installed the 3.1 airport software
- shutdown the machine, insert AE card and started the machine.
after about 3 minutes it detected the AE card again and has not crashed since.
conclusion:
- my best guess is that the 3.1 update had tried to flash the firmware on the AE card but somehow failed. that caused continuous kernel panics. reapplying AE3.1 reflashed the card (?).
i hope this helps someone, maybe one of you know what happened in the end?
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