[fireteddy]

Hey all.

My beloved 12" PB G4 (1.3GHz/512MB), purchased a year ago this August, died two days ago, and I still have no idea what happened to it. I'll give a sequence of events which hopefully will lead someone to a stunning, Baker Street epiphany as to its muderer:

1) My hard drive had been acting screwy of late, so I backed up all my files to an external USB HD and booted from my Tiger DVD to run Disk Utility on it. When I verified the drive, it had an error--"the underlying task failed on exit", or something of the sort--and it wouldn't repair, just gave the same error and aborted the repair. After the repair attempt the Tiger installer refused to acknowledge the existence of the drive, so I went back into Disk Utility and erased it. The erased drive was recognized, and I installed Tiger (without most of the language and printer packs).

2) It's running smooth as silk--the hard disk problems have apparently been solved. I spend a day re-installing software (the usual--Office 2004, Photoshop, Logic Express, iLife '05), and it seems to be working fine, still---faster than ever, in fact. When time comes for sleeping I close the lid, putting it to sleep, and open it a few minutes later to make sure sleep worked properly. It did; I closed the lid for the night.

3) The next morning I opened it up to check my email--still worked great. After answering emails for about ~40 minutes, I close the lid once more, and the little light pulses, so it's still asleep. I put the notebook in my backpack and jump onto the bus for campus.

4) Thirty minutes later I get there. I plug in the power supply, and when I open the notebook, I hear a high-pitched buzzing that was loud at first (enough to be heard by a friend fifteen feet away) but then decreased rapidly in volume until it was barely audible--I could only hear it if I put my ear against the back.

5) Still at this point. If the battery is in, and I push the power button, it emits the buzzing noise: the display does not turn on, nor do I hear the sounds of a hard drive, and the keyboard does not respond. Taking the battery out stops the buzzing. Similarly, if I disconnect the battery but connect it through the AC adapter, the buzzing noise starts, and stops when I unplug the adapter. The system is totally unresponsive to all commands except the power button, which starts the buzzing--the only thing that can stop the buzzing is disconnecting the notebook from all power sources.

is basically my answer to all of this. This has been the Week from Apple Hell, my iPod died on Thursday (hard drive failure) and, of course, both of these things are long out of warranty. I've been forced onto my iMac G3 (500Mhz/128MB), which has held up remarkably well but, as you can imagine, not magnificently. I obviously can't run PS or Logic or anything more intensive than Firefox really.

Anyone have any ideas? I pay in double-creme Oreos.

Yours,

Tedsle.

[ibook_steve]

The power circuitry in your machine sounds hosed. You can try resetting the PMU, but I doubt that will even work with the problems you're having. Try it anyway.

Steve

[fireteddy]

Thanks for the quick help.

Is this the command+shift+p+r thing?

</ignorant>

If it is I have already tried it--no go. If not, how can I go about doing it? Can the part be replaced or is it a "your machine is -ed" problem?

[ibook_steve]

No.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=14449

Steve

[fireteddy]

Urkg. You were, unfortunately, right---looks like the computer is too shot for this---urgk. I am using my imagination here (my average computer knowledge is wofully insufficient in times like these) but I imagine the power supply/PMU/whatever is broken'd is integrated with the logic board? & that therefore to solve the problem I would, conceivably, need to replace that board? Hrmph.

Any further ideas before I relegate it to the grave? and/or the apple store in Yorkdale?

[rjt1000]

Hi,

I have the same PowerBook (G4 12 inch 1.33 ghz) and its toshiba hard drive died a year and a week after purchase. My sister also has the same model and her toshiba hard drive died just under a year after purchase. Fortunately Apple covered both repairs under warranty.

Given the hard drive issues you originally had, I suspect that the hard drive is still the problem. Have you tried to start up with your system restore disks or with an external firewire drive? Unfortunately, if your internal drive is fried, the system may hang and not allow you to get to the point where you can start with an external drive.

I would suggest going to the apple store, making a reservation at the genius bar, and then letting them do some trouble shooting. they will give you a modest amount of help for free, and an estimate of what it would cost to fix.

best wishes,

Rich

[fireteddy]

Thanks for the thoughts.

Unfortunately it won't even boot to anything, at all---just a blank screen. It may be, indeed, that the drive is fried--at this point I'm praying that's the problem--I could use more capacity anyway. I'm going to try and trek down to the Apple Store sometime this weekend, but unfortunately the closest Apple store, and the only one in this entire godforsaken country, is a good three and a half hours of torturous winter driving away. I was hoping for an easy solution---unrelated questions, but a) do they diagnose iPods at the Genius Bar, and b) Does the trade-in-your-iPod-for-store-credit-thing still happen?

[ibook_steve]

It's not the hard drive. If it was the hard drive, you'd get something on the screen and no loud noise. The power supply is shot, meaning the board probably needs to be replaced.

Steve

[cambro]

And the moral of the story....

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