[mvansickle]

I have a 15" Aluminium G4 Powerbook that recently froze. Rather than using force quit or the restart key, my girlfriend held down the power key to force it off.

Following that incident, the computer would not boot up all the way- it went to a black screen.

I reset PRAM and PMU several times. No change.

I reseated the memory- nothing. Then I removed a 1GB chip I had bought and replaced it with the original the other 256 chip that came with the powerbook. (I had one 256 and one 1G in there).

Reset PRAM again.

Got it to boot to the "Starting up" screen but once the bar is at the end, it goes no further.

Started up from disk utility but that the utility failed. Started up from Apple care cd and ran that utility but it ran for about 13 hours and was not progressing.

Should I try to buy a new 1G memory and install that? Maybe it does not have enough RAM to boot up right now?

Any help is greatly appreciated

[mvansickle]

Also, won't start up in safe mode- just shuts off.

[seanc]

In what way did disk utility 'fail'?

Boot from the OS X cd and check the SMART status of the hard drive in disk utility.

[mvansickle]

i'll check the smart status. the disk utility gave me a failure message when i ran it - wouldn't even verify

[seanc]

Originally Posted by mvansickle 

i'll check the smart status. the disk utility gave me a failure message when i ran it - wouldn't even verify

If it gave us a failure, you should have mentioned it.
The failure could indicate a dying HDD.

[Waragainstsleep]

If DU fails to even verify, then the HD is dying. Backup if you can (try firewire target mode).

[Sherman Homan]

Under the last few 10.4 versions I have found that if the hard drive fails the fsck test during the Safe Mode start the computer just shuts off.

[mvansickle]

the disk utility shows SMART Status Verified

the error message reads: invalid catalog record type

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit.


New memory did not fix the problem

[Sherman Homan]

Ram has nothing to do with this particular error. You have directory error that fsck and Disk Utility can't fix. So your two choices are to boot in Target mode, copy everything off the drive, reformat with a single zero pass, then test it again. Or get Disk Warrior or TechTools and see if they can fix it. Good luck!

[mvansickle]

went to mac store. used disk warrior to rebuild and repair permissions. archived and installed. finally worked! got in there and backed up everything i wanted. tried to update the software after i backedup but kept freezing. now i get flashing question mark when i boot up. ran disk warrior again and tried to reinstall. when i reinstall the installation fails. guess another trip to the mac store

[seanc]

Sounds like the hard drive may have failed.

[Biest]

HDD has seized to work, you will need to replace it. I have had the same problem, you are even lucky you got the data off. When that happened to me, DU ruined the HDD so much that I couldn't even get my data off... good that i backup