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darell · May 25, 2006, 07:14 PM

Hello everyone. Ive been reading the forum board and everyone is so helpful. This is my first post and I apologise if I'm repeating previous problems.

My G3 ibook has been having frequent kernel panics over the last couple of months and now it refuses to start up. I get the apple logo for a second before the screen changes and the panic message appears. I've tried booting up via open firewall, single-user mode (which brings up some kind of panic log, but wont allow me to type anything), resetting PRAM. infact everything that has been mentioned on here so far. I was given extra RAM a coupel of months ago which I thought might be the problem so I removed it, but has made no difference. I also don't have the start up discs at the moment as they are in the UK. Also the logic board was replaced a few months ago as it was one of the faulty batch from apple.

I would greatly appreciate any other suggestions. My boyfriend thinks the hd has probably failed and Im worried I'll lose all my data (photos, documents etc)

xx thanks

Catfish_Man · May 25, 2006, 07:37 PM

Can you take a picture of the panic log?

tooki · May 25, 2006, 07:44 PM

As of Jaguar, kernel panics are not displayed on screen. They are saved to the NVRAM and then written to disk on the next startup as the panic.log file. I doubt that this system is booting far enough to be able to save the panic log.

But I doubt the drive has failed. The fact that it can bring up the Apple logo means that it is reading the BootX file from the hard disk -- the logo is stored on-disk, not in firmware.

I'd suggest using Target Disk Mode to see if you can mount the disk on another Mac to recover the data.

tooki

Catfish_Man · May 25, 2006, 07:47 PM

which brings up some kind of panic log, but wont allow me to type anything

As of Jaguar, kernel panics are not displayed on screen

um....

tooki · May 25, 2006, 07:52 PM

Unless she's running a really ancient version of OS X, the kernel panic screen does not show any information, just "You need to restart your computer." I guess I really meant "as of Jaguar, kernel panic text is not shown on screen."

Single-user mode doesn't show the panic log, just the UNIX startup process.

tooki

darell · May 25, 2006, 11:05 PM

Thanks you two for replying so quickly. Perhaps I didnt understand what was being shown in single user mode, it just looked like a jumble of numbers and the word panic so I asssumed it might have been some kind of log

darell · May 25, 2006, 11:08 PM

Im trying to get an image of it up to show you, but in the meanwhile the last line reads

panic: We are hanging here...

Catfish_Man · May 25, 2006, 11:49 PM

Originally Posted by tooki

Unless she's running a really ancient version of OS X, the kernel panic screen does not show any information, just "You need to restart your computer." I guess I really meant "as of Jaguar, kernel panic text is not shown on screen."

Single-user mode doesn't show the panic log, just the UNIX startup process.

tooki

I've seen panic backtraces in SUM before, specifically when my airport card was poorly seated (either 10.3.9 or 10.4.0, I don't recall).

darell · May 25, 2006, 11:57 PM

I dont have an airport card. The only thing I ever added to my ibook was the extra RAM and I have removed that now.
My computer is a G3 running OSX 10.3.9

kick52 · May 28, 2006, 04:06 AM

can you start it up in verbose mode?

Apple + V on startup.

Or in safe mode?

Hold shift on startup.

darell · May 29, 2006, 01:47 AM

Thanks for your suggestions. I couldnt start up in single user mode but I could do verbose mode.

In the end I ended up removing the harddrive and I tried it on another computer, to see whether it was actually the hd and whether I could retrieve any information. Our other laptop runs windows and couldnt read the drive. I then put another hd into my ibook and am currently running linux on it. Linux could read some of my hd (i attached it externally) so I was able to save my most important documents...... and also showed that my computer itself is running fine. So I will just have to wait for the install discs to arrive from the uk and then I'll just reinstall on a new hd.
I really think my mac hd died and from what I read here and there, that isnt all that uncommon, but it just caught me by suprise as it happened just like that.

thanks again all
xx