The Long, Sad Story of Rinoa: iBook G4

Once upon a time, my then-sixteen-year-old nephew Christian received an iBook G4 for his birthday in January 2005. Since he was a super nerd, he spent his days playing World of Warcraft. The iBook's name was Rinoa.

Christian and Rinoa were happy until one day, when walking into my room, a glass of "water," my messy--messy--room, and Christian (with Rinoa in hand) crossed paths and disaster ensued.

At the time, I was working and my mom frantically called me asking what to do. I told them to turn off the computer and as soon as I was off work, I was looking up how to open an iBook on the internet and asking my nephew what had happened. He lied to me, saying that the water he had was just water--not in fact Sprite (his favorite beverage). He also said that he kept poor, poor Rinoa on for at least 30 minutes after the initial glass-full she had taken and had simply turned her upside down.

Whenever Rinoa was turned on from then on, she was only an expensive kaleidescope with normal Mac sounds.

We brought her to an Apple store and a sympathetic Genius stealthily put it in for a new Logic Board.

A few days later, we received her back and she seemed to be working fine! Everything was how it used to be. Christian was now banned from my room, though, and banned from being near any electronics with drinks. Besides that, everything was O.K.--that is, until Rinoa kicked the bucket full-on.

Another trip to the Apple Store. Another Genius sending Rinoa's corpse into be repaired. This time, a phone call reporting "liquid damage" voided AppleCare and suggested us to pay $800 for repairs. We declined.

I then paid my nephew $100 for Rinoa to keep as my own. I've opened her, cleaned her out, and actually got her to boot! It only got to a screen which had a folder with the Mac face interchangeably blinking with a question mark. My knowledgeable friend Samantha said it could be because there is no operating system on the hard drive. I admit that I most likely broke the SuperDrive when I tried to, er, force a OS X Tiger install disc into it. (Whoops.) So booting from a disc was out of the question. Since the only other Mac in the house was Intel-based, using its hard drive bay to possibly load OS X was also out.

Samantha and I then agreed that she would try loading OS X onto the iBook's hard drive via her Mac mini G4 --maybe it would work!? I'm not entirely sure yet what she has done thus far other than loading the iBook's hard drive into the mini's and seeing nothing on it, and loading the mini's hard drive in the iBook's and getting the same error as before.

Thank you all for reading this! If you have suggestions or comments, I would really appreciate them.

That was a great read, although I'm sorry for your loss. Rinoa sounded like she was great to you. Too bad your wicked nephew ruined everything. Hopefully Rinoa will rise from the dead and save you from your sins! or at least run the OS.

firewire

What about booting from an external firewire disk? I heard somewhere with macs that its possible....

o rly?

I've never read that, but I'll look into it. As of now, I think the verdict on the iBook is that it's dead. I'm not sure what I can do with an empty shell.

This is known as Target Disk Mode.

Beautiful story, rickymint. I hope we can help you get Rinoa back.

And welcome to Mac-Forums!

Does she work?

x2 on the Target Disk mode. There have been several successful cases on the forum that I know of and read where it worked w.o. an issue. I assume that is what Sam is going to try and do? Keep us updated!

you can do it rinoa...LIVE!!

hahaha Thanks for all your support, everyone!

I don't know what Sam is doing now, but I let her know about the Target Disc Mode and she's going to try booting it from her iPod and then the Mac mini if it fails.

If that doesn't work, we're going to try and figure out if we can run Linux from a thumb drive.

This will require dubious amounts of RedBull, Bawls, and coffee, of course.

I will keep you all updated!