[mschaef]

Hi all. I hate to have to introduce myself this way, but I've just started having trouble with my wife's iBook, and have some questions I could not answer via the archives (or Google). I did find this site, though, and it's helped a little with the diagnosis:

http://norum.homeunix.net/~carl/mods/sticky/index.html

The iBook in question is a 12" 700MHz Dual-USB model that we've had for around 18 months. Up until today, it has run quite well and done everything we've asked. We don't cart it around all that much, but it does get moved around a little. The display gets opened/closed pretty much every time we use the machine.

Today, the machine basically refuses to boot up. I've tried 10-20 times and gotten a startup chime every time, and a screen about three times. The display I get is almost invariably flat gray with flickering horizontal bars that can be made to come and go by pressing on the display. I tried booting into open firmware, and got what I think looks like the open firmware screen (I've never used it before so I don't know for sure) and then immediately to the flat, flickery gray. I've also seen the machine boot to the point of having the beachball cursor in the upper right and the happy Mac logo in the center of the screen. (Yes, it's still on OSX 10.1.)

Reading through the archives, I've seen a couple common causes of this problem. One is the possibility of a worn backlight control cable through the display hinge. The other is the logic board issue. Since the machine refuses to boot, is it safe to assume that this is in fact a logic board issue rather than a cable issue? The fact that the display can be pushed around and influence the flicker seems to point to a cable problem.

My second question is that since we're seeing the happy mac logo, is it safe to assume that the disk is still valid? My understanding is that OSX is responsible for the display of the logo, so it seems to follow that at least something is coming off of the disk drive.

Third, with the machine in the state it's in, how likely am I to be able to use it in Target Disk Mode? Can a Windows XP PC be the master for the iBook's target, or do I need to find another Macintosh?

At this point, the files are more important to us than the machine itself. (We have backups of most of it, but not all.) If I pull the ATA disk out of the iBook, and mount it in my PC, Is there OSX filesystem support in Linux? Darwin/X86? *BSD?

Thanks alot for reading through this, and for any help you can offer. Like I said before, I didn't find the answers I was looking for in the archives and Google.

[mschaef]

Okay, I just found out that it was open firmware mode. The display was stable until I pressed a key, and then it instantly went to the same flickery flat gray.

Another oddity is that the LED ring around the power switch is not on, and the VGA output does not appear to be working. I guess that those are initialized later on in the boot process?

[mschaef]

I've been hacking at the machine a little longer and have had some positive results. I was able to get the machine booted into MacOS X a few times, long enough to use AirPort and an external USB keyboard to copy files onto my desktop.

In the process of doing this, I saw it fail a few times in the manner previously documented on macnn: vertical bars, strange fade-in/fade-out, and ultimately static.

I'm guessing that this means logic board, and a ~$280 repair. Given that the machine is needing both RAM and a OS upgrade, it's likely beyond being worth helping.

Thanks for listening.

[ccsccs7]

Well, I don't know if it's too late for this, but to use the iBook in Target Disk Mode with a PC, you need software that will allow the PC to read the Mac formatted hard drive.

Either Mac Opener or MacDrive on the PC.

Sorry to hear about the iBook.

[mschaef]

Well, I don't know if it's too late for this, but to use the iBook in Target Disk Mode with a PC, you need software that will allow the PC to read the Mac formatted hard drive.

Thanks, I appreciate the advise. I was able to get the machine to hold together long enough to do it over AirPort and an SMB share.

Sorry to hear about the iBook.

Yeah, me too. I really liked the little machine, and it served its purpose well. (My wife wrote most of her dissertation on it)

The ironic thing about this is that we bought the Apple after looking at the other machines and deciding that the Apple looked/felt much better built than comparably priced PC laptops.