Got an iBook G4 - Blue Screen when installing OS

Hi

So I've just picked up this old iBook G4 for next to nothing. I popped in a new 512MB RAM stick and a 20GB HDD to see if I could get it up and running.

My friend gave me his old Leopard install DVD, so I booted it up and formatted the drive to Apples spec. I then began the installation.

The machine began to check the disk integrity, which was taking quite a while. I went to check on it and it had frozen at 21% (the mouse wouldn't move), so I turned the machine off.

Following some information on the internet I booted into Single User mode (CMD-S) and ran 'fsck -f'. Upon rebooting my machine now displays the Apple logo, spinning wheel and then goes to a blue screen where it hangs. I have read here that it could be an issue with a chip overheating. I find this hard to believe in my case because I can leave the machine running in single user terminal without any freezes. (I have been running fsck a few times to test this).

Any ideas?

EDIT: Just did a verbose boot - the only error message that jumped out was ''no interface name for airport.." which came up twice. Does this help?

Thanks a lot

What kind of Leopard DVD are you using? In order to install Leopard on that iBook, the DVD has to be the retail version. The retail version of Leopard is black not silver gray. If you have the silver gray version it won't work.

Anyway, you may be better off installing Tiger on that machine as it will run better and requires less resources. But again, you'll need the retail version.

chscag said:

What kind of Leopard DVD are you using? In order to install Leopard on that iBook, the DVD has to be the retail version. The retail version of Leopard is black not silver gray. If you have the silver gray version it won't work.

Anyway, you may be better off installing Tiger on that machine as it will run better and requires less resources. But again, you'll need the retail version.

Click to expand...

Yep, it's a retail disk (as in, it didn't come bundled with a mac).

Any more tips?

Thanks

If it's a retail disk (black) it should work OK. Make sure that hard drive is OK as it sounds like it may have problems. Do you have another drive you can substitute instead?

Another interesting thing about the iBook is its PRAM battery. It doesn't have one. The system clock and startup juice is provided by capacitor storage of a charge. And that won't work right if the iBook battery (main battery) is not charged or defective or not in place.

chscag said:

If it's a retail disk (black) it should work OK. Make sure that hard drive is OK as it sounds like it may have problems. Do you have another drive you can substitute instead?

Another interesting thing about the iBook is its PRAM battery. It doesn't have one. The system clock and startup juice is provided by capacitor storage of a charge. And that won't work right if the iBook battery (main battery) is not charged or defective or not in place.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. I only bought the HDD a couple of days ago and running the fsck command returned no errors, so I'm assuming the HDD is OK. I do have another but switching is a lot of effort so I'd like to view it as a last resort.

I have tried resetting the PRAM but I suppose that was pointless if the iBook doesn't have PRAM The laptop has been sat for a long period of time, so perhaps that could be an issue - although I did charge the laptop quite a bit and last night it managed to boot into the install DVD and re-format the drive using Disk Utility, so I don't quite know why it won't boot anymore :S

I'd really appreciate any more help you have to offer!

Thanks a lot

EDIT: So I was thinking - perhaps the DVD drive is on it's way out, that's why it won't boot? Because it can sit in the Single User cmd line for as long as it wants without freezing, and the only other boot option is the install disk (since the HDD is empty atm). So I was looking for a solution and found this post:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20061017084322177

Using this method, could I use my iMac to copy the install disk to an external drive and boot from it?

Thanks

The optical drive could be failing. Certain PPC machines will boot from an external USB 2.0 drive but most won't. Firewire is usually required. You could certainly give it a try. Let us know if it works.

chscag said:

The optical drive could be failing. Certain PPC machines will boot from an external USB 2.0 drive but most won't. Firewire is usually required. You could certainly give it a try. Let us know if it works.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. My iMac is running Lion but I intend to copy the contents of the Leopard install DVD to the USB stick using 'Super Duper!' and then boot from that using my iBook. When people refer to USB 2.0, do they mean the port on the iBook, or the media which is being connected? I can't figure out if my stick is 2.0, but I'm assuming it is since it's pretty new.

Cheers

It could be the RAM you installed. All iBooks have one stick of RAM soldered to the Logic board. Take out the stick you put in and see if you still get that blue screen with the installer. If not, you found your issue.

Do you know any specs on the iBook? Is it white? 12"?

And to install Leopard it is necessary to have an 867MHz processor or faster. April 2003 900MHz models were released.

dtravis7 said:

It could be the RAM you installed. All iBooks have one stick of RAM soldered to the Logic board. Take out the stick you put in and see if you still get that blue screen with the installer. If not, you found your issue.

Do you know any specs on the iBook? Is it white? 12"?

Click to expand...

Awesome, I'll try that tomorrow. It would make sense since the error occurred after RAM was changed. It's a 14" White G4 model with around 900mhz processor. Hope that helps.