[the_matt]

Hi guys, new to the forum, but it seemed that there is some good advice being given here. I recently bought a 12" powerbook 867 on ebay. It had some dents and scratches on it but I thought, hey I'm a computer savvy kind of guy, why not just replace the case! Dumb idea. I got a disassembly guide, took it apart with great success. got the new case parts together. Then I put it back together. All the parts went in the right places I'm sure of it (I've checked a few times). Some of the cables were kind of hard to run back through the right holes and taping them back into place gave me some trouble but I did it and the case went back together near flawlessly. Then I attempted to turn it on.... I got a cryptic error message that simply said "An error has occurred, your computer must restart" or something to that effect. Tried it again, same result. So I thought well, maybe some data was damaged on the drive. I inserted the osx 10.4 cd and booted from the cd and it booted perfectly. I reinstalled osx (since i didn't really have any data that needed saving) and rebooted- same error message. I tried to start in safe mode, the computer wouldn't start. I rebooted again with the osx cd and ran the disk tool. It found and repaired one problem with the permissions on the drive, but found no other problems. I again tried to restart in safe mode. This time it booted and I went through all of the questions about installing osx and went through to the desktop. So I restarted out of safe mode, it again booted to the desktop. I messed around for a bit and again got the restart error message. I tried to restart and got the restart error message again. I restarted and got to the desktop, but the system seemed to be very unstable (I cannot scroll up and down in a window for example). I'm still thinking that I may have damaged my hard drive somewhere in the disassembly.

Long story short, what do you think is wrong and what (if anything) can I do to fix it?

[the_matt]

Alrighty, well I tried using my neighbors g5 tower as a target disk but had even less luck. I got a kernel panic on startup every time. The tests I ran on techtool all came back okay except files which it repaired. I decided to repair permissions again and it repaired some. I reset the pram, open firmware, and the pmu. I still have all of the same problems which I will try and describe in a little more detail. OSX boots about 60% of the time. When it does boot it acts strangely. When I try to grab a window and move it across the screen it smears it all over instead of moving. When I try to scroll up down inside of a window, the middle of whatever the window was showing stays the same and either the bottom (if scrolling down) or the top (if scrolling up) seems to stay the same. OSX also will intermittently kernel panic and just seems generally slow and unstable. However, when starting from a cd or in safe boot, none of these problems persist. Anyone have any more ideas because I'm about ready to sell it for parts and find a new laptop.

[D'Espice]

If you ask me, this sounds like a bad memory stick. Try replacing that first, the message you're getting is a kernel panic, and that in turn usually occurs when the memory has gone bananas

[Clive]

The drive could also be faulty - I've seen this recently with a G3 tower that kept getting kernel panics at boot-up. Try booting the machine from an external drive to try to isolate the problem.

[the_matt]

Thanks for the replies guys. Ok, sorry for my noobness earlier. I've tried starting it without the memory stick and I get the same problems. If it is memory then I guess it could be the memory that is soldered to the logic board and that would really suck. On the drive front, whenever I boot from cd, I have no problems at all. I wish I had an external hard disk to boot from but I don't. If I post the log from my kernel panics here is there anyone who can interpret them? I sure can't. Lastly, anyone know how to get a hold of the apple hardware test cd for my machine, b/c I don't have it. Another website recommended Techtool as a good alternative, will it be able to isolate my problem? Thanks again guys.

[Clive]

If you have another PowerBook you can try this: start the other PowerBook in target disk mode (hold down the "T" key on boot) and you'll see the Firewire icon on screen. Stick a Firewire cable from your faulty PowerBook into the machine in target disk mode, the internal disk of the other machine will appear on the desktop. Now set your start-up disk to be the other machine's disk, restart.

If the machine is now stable, booting from the other disk, then it looks like you have a faulty internal disk in the 12" - but it's not a guarantee.

PS, you can do this with almost any Mac after the earliest G4 desktops - so, if you have any PowerPC desktop Macs you can do the same thing, put them into target disk mode, and then boot your PowerBook from them.

[the_matt]

My neighbor has a g5 tower, so I may be able to try that later today. Good idea Clive! Anyway, I've been working with it all morning and here's the weird thing, it boots every time in safe boot! Works perfectly too. I have no idea why though, it has a fresh install of osx and I have wiped the drive (even erased free space). I obtained a copy of techtool from my neighbor who has applecare. It's running tests now. I'll post the results when its done.

[the_matt]

Originally Posted by the_matt 

Alrighty, well I tried using my neighbors g5 tower as a target disk but had even less luck. I got a kernel panic on startup every time. The tests I ran on techtool all came back okay except files which it repaired. I decided to repair permissions again and it repaired some. I reset the pram, open firmware, and the pmu. I still have all of the same problems which I will try and describe in a little more detail. OSX boots about 60% of the time. When it does boot it acts strangely. When I try to grab a window and move it across the screen it smears it all over instead of moving. When I try to scroll up down inside of a window, the middle of whatever the window was showing stays the same and either the bottom (if scrolling down) or the top (if scrolling up) seems to stay the same. OSX also will intermittently kernel panic and just seems generally slow and unstable. However, when starting from a cd or in safe boot, none of these problems persist. Anyone have any more ideas because I'm about ready to sell it for parts and find a new laptop.

don't know what went wrong but the time was wrong on this post.

[the_matt]

ok I'm all out of ideas. I took the thing apart again as a last ditch effort to see if MAYBE I put something in the wrong place (i.e. grounded motherboard, cables in the wrong place, etc.) I fixed some problems in the case and put some electrical tape down on the bottom to make sure that the motherboard wasn't grounding. put it all back together- same problems. So, my kernel panics don't seem to be hardware related or software related. great. I probably fried some tiny resistor on the MB or something. errgh. this thing is going on ebay as parts.

[Clive]

Does look like it has a hardware problem somewhere - so probably the best thing for it.