Blinking screen on start-up!

When I press the power button on the iBook, immediately I get a blinking screen. ie a white horizontal flashing line goes from top to bottom on the display. It then stays like this indefinitely. To make it stop I have to either take out the battery or the power-cable. The start-up process goes no further!!!

I have tried starting up with both the cable & the battery separately but the same thing occurs for both.

I fear the worst (Logic-board replacement) but does anyone have any ideas/suggestions to my problem?

The laptop is an iBook G4 1.2Ghz running Tiger (10.4.11)

I would try these, in this order.

Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM

Resetting PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit (PMU)

Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck

The Apple Hardware test.
And if it is the logic board or graphics card, this should let you know.

If you need the AHT.
http://www.info.apple.com/support/aht.html

Soulwar said:

I would try these, in this order.

Resetting your Mac's PRAM and NVRAM

Resetting PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit (PMU)

Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck

The Apple Hardware test.
And if it is the logic board or graphics card, this should let you know.

If you need the AHT.
http://www.info.apple.com/support/aht.html

Click to expand...

ok, I will try all these steps now & report back. thanks

ok. none of these work at all.

Basically the blinking screen appears right away when I press the power button so I am unable to perform any of these tasks.

And to top it all off, now i can't get my AHT disk out of the optical drive!

:bump: incase anyone else has any ideas

Can you try an external monitor? You could find out if its just the screen or a hardware problem.

Hold the mouse (trackpad) button down during restart. It should eject the disk.

Soulwar said:

Can you try an external monitor? You could find out if its just the screen or a hardware problem.

Hold the mouse (trackpad) button down during restart. It should eject the disk.

Click to expand...

good idea. I'll try an external monitor tomorrow!


The method of holding the trackpad button doesn't work to eject the disk.