Chosen Solution
about a year ago my iBook would freeze and i would have to reboot it constantly. Eventually It wouldn’t boot at all and would just stay on the gray or blue screen. I took it to the genius bar and they told me that my hard drive was dying. I then took it to someone who said they could replace it for around $700. No. Thank. You. So I just got around to my little project yesterday. Took it apart and replaced the 30GB hard drive with a 160GB one, and also increased the ram with a 520MB ram chip. It was all very straightforward and simple, thanks to this awesome website. But when I got to the part where I needed to install OS x 10.4 Tiger, I ran into the same problem that I had before I replaced the hard drive. I inserted the disk and held down the option key while restarting the computer. An OS X icon appeared with a swirly arrow on the left (like a refresh icon)and a right pointing arrow on the right side. When I clicked the right pointing arrow it went to grey screen, then blue screen. I tried restarting it while holding down the C key and same thing. BTW, my iBook did not come with Tiger. I think it came with Jaguar (10.3.2 maybe?) I bought the highest version of OS that my 800MHz processor can handle, on ebay. It is not a black disk but a grey one that says “for G3, G4, and G5 computers” or something like that. Can’t tell you for sure because the disc is now stuck in the optical drive. Can anyone tell me if there could be some other problem besides the hard drive? Am I installing the wrong OS? And how do I get the darned disk out of the drive if it won’t boot? Is there anything else I should be considering? Sorry for the long winded question, but I am very frustrated. Please help!
Hi! If you hold down the trackpad button while powering on, it should kick out the disc. I hate to say it, but I’ve had several slower-speed G4 iBooks come up with a problem like that, i.e. seems to work in option mode, but whatever you do it just gets to a blue screen. The conclusion in most of the cases has been, for a lack of a better explanation, that the board is bad. You can rule out your optical drive failing to read the media by connecting a firewire external optical drive and booting from that, or another really good test would be to boot from another Mac’s hard drive or optical drive while connected via firewire in target mode. If your machine runs fine off of a remote machine’s hard drive, you know your board is good, so obviously that would be a good test. I don’t think you necessarily have the wrong installer media…if it was just the wrong disc, it should at least load further and then tell you it’s the wrong one. Having the wrong installer media shouldn’t cause the computer to freeze on a blue screen. Also, I would remove the battery, Airport, and the extended RAM you just bought, just to rule those out, and then immediately reset the PMU and PRAM, and then see if it boots any further off the disc. Good luck, and let us know what happens!
To reset the PMU on an iBook you need to shut down the unit. Remove all cords from the ports, including the power adapter. Remove the battery from the bottom of the computer. Then hold down the power button for 5 seconds. After this go ahead and put the battery back in and plug the computer into the power adapter. The PRAM reset is holding the command, option, p and r keys down while the computer is booting. You will know you have done this correctly because about at the apple screen the unit will restart and you will here the startup chime happen again. Best regards, Xen Also you may be able to eject the disk from the option boot screen. Just try holding the eject key for a couple seconds when it comes up.
So happy to find this thread! The same fix just worked for me.
