[shifuimam]

I booted up my trusty clamshell just now to start working on my LCD mod project again - and it wouldn't boot. I haven't touched this iBook in over a month. Granted, it has been laying here with its innards out, but nobody has moved it or touched it in weeks.

It won't boot. At all. I have reset the PRAM, NVRAM, and PMU to no avail. Upon attempting a normal boot, I get the startup chime once and then a grey screen that flashes between the blue folder with a ? and the blue folder with the Mac face (finder icon). If I attempt to boot from my OS X 10.3 retail CD 1, it refuses and tries to boot off the hard drive, which then fails. If I do an option+boot and attempt to select either the hard drive or the CD-ROM, the CD will spin up, the boot selection screen will flash...and come back to the selection screen, which appears to me that it's failed again.

I'm about to have a heart attack here - I have stuff on this hard drive that I don't want to lose, so I'd rather not reinstall - which doesn't seem possible right now anyhow, given that the stupid CD-ROM won't boot either! This is an aftermarket combo drive I've installed. I have the original CD-ROM, and I can pull it from another semi-assembled clamshell I have to see if my iBook will boot off that. I don't know what else to do.

I have the boyfriend's 12" PB G4, so I can boot into target disk mode on the clamshell and copy my data over...but I don't know why the drive would have done this to me. It's not that old a drive - maybe four years old and rarely used until I put it in the clamshell a year ago.

Any help is greatly, greatly appreciated.

[shifuimam]

I lied - my old CD-ROM from my clamshell no longer works, for unknown reasons.

I *really* need to be able to boot this thing. I will send cookies to whoever can help me!

[shifuimam]

This is too weird - on impulse, I decided to re-install the 256MB RAM module (in addition to the 64MB soldered on the logic board), and it booted.

I'm pretty sure I have previously booted this iBook with the 256MB module removed. Any ideas why a change in memory would cause OS X to refuse to boot?

I'm happy I got it to boot, but that was just weird - on every PC I've worked with, removing one or more RAM modules (but always leaving some RAM) will just bring up a "system memory changed" warning at boot, but the OS will still load...

[AC Rempt]

And you immediately backed up everything on the hard drive, right? ;-)

Don't know the answer to why re-seating the RAM would fix your problem, but glad it did. I guess it's like smacking the side of an old CRT.

[Sherman Homan]

I *really* need to be able to boot this thing. I will send cookies to whoever can help me!

I am glad it is back running, are you going to send the cookies to yourself?!