12-08-2007, 04:42 PM

I'm new here. I have an iBook G4 that is running Tiger. A few days ago, I was browsing the web with an almost dead battery. I heard a click, like the sound made when opening a window, which coincided with my clicking on a link, then my screen went black. I assumed the battery was just dead, so I plugged in, but nothing happened. When I turned it on, I got the ?/finder folder instead of a boot. I booted it to my husband's iBook and ran disk utility & disk warrior, and it said it fixed a bunch of things. I backed it up completely. I reinstalled Tiger with archive, then tried to do an erase reinstall. After all this, when I turn it on, I still get the ?/finder screen. My hard drive is obviously not completely gone because I can pull stuff off it. If I get a new hard drive will it fix my problem, or could there be something else going on?

Thanks for any suggestions!

12-10-2007, 10:25 AM

That "click" you heard sounds like it may have been the hard drive suddenly stopping (due to a low battery). In my experience, this has never led to hard drive damage, but I wouldn't put it out of the question. Try these three things:

Reset Pram: When booting, hold Command+Option+P+R Keep holding this until you hear 3 chimes. See if that helps you

Target Disk: Insert the Tiger CD you have. When it boots up, chose your language, then go to utilities at the top. Click either target disk or startup disk (I forget which it is) and tell it to start using your osx volume. This has worked for me in the past with a similar problem.

Complete Reinstall: If none of this works, do a complete format of your drive (using disk utility when booting from the tiger disk) using the hfs+ format and install to that drive. If none of this works, you may need a new hard drive.

Hope this helps.

Trent out