My daughter's 933 iBook will not boot. It gets as far as the Apple and spinning wheel, but never gets farther. She is running 10.3.x. Not sure how far she updated it. She has two bootable partitions, but booting holding down the option key only shows the first partition and it will not boot.
It will also not boot from the AppleCare TechTool Deluze CD that came with it, or from my Panther CD, either by holding down the c key, or by holding down the option key, or by holding down command-shift-option-delete.
I have tried zapping the PRAM. Still no luck.
I can get her drive to mount on my G4 using target disk mode, and running Disk Utility's Disk First Aid gives the drive a clean bill of health.
She does in fact have a fairly recent (non-bootable) backup of her essential files on an external USB drive, and I was able to get the more recent stuff off using target disk mode.
It is still under warranty. She took it into dealer and left it overnight, but they said there was no hardware problem and she should re-install the system. I would do that if I could boot it from a CD.
To be fair, she forgot to leave me her install CD, so I will have to get her to bring that, but since it won't boot from the TechToolDeluxe CD that came with it or from my retail Panther install CD, I am not optimistic.
When I boot in verbose mode, I get the following error message, if they mean anything to anyone:
dyld: /usr/libexec/register_mach_bootstrap_servers malformed library: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation (not a Mach-0 file, bad magic number)
and
Starting Virtual Memory
dyld: SystemStarter malformed library: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/Versions/A/CoreFoundation (mot a Mach -0 file, bad magic number)
/etc/rc: line 282: 118 Trace/BPT trap SystemStarter -gr ${VerboseFlag} ${SafeBoot}
By the way, I have had to reformt her drive twice already and the computer is less than a year old.