teacher Posted June 30, 2005 Share Posted June 30, 2005 You all know I am not a Mac person but I do like them. However, I have in my possession a G4 laptop that has had a faulty hard drive replaced. It has only been back a few weeks and now it has the same problem. It states "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." This is a vicious cycle. We have restarted it several times and always the same thing. I have tried holding down the shift key while booting. Is there anyother magical key combination that will get me into the hard drive so I can see what is going on??? The Mac belongs to the girl next door and she would really like to use her own computer and not have to come over and hook up to Teacher's Computer Service Network..... :'( I have tried the apple key as well. What am I doing wrong. Please don't tell me I am holding my mouth wrong. Sorry, that is the usual answer I get with my family. :DAnyone have any ideas for me to try????Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teacher Posted June 30, 2005 Author Share Posted June 30, 2005 I should also mention I have tried the things from here: http://www.apple.com/support/mac101/help/2/It will not start in safe mode. It does not work with the left shift, right shift or both shift keys. It will not work trying the single user mode. Also, it will not start with or without an ethernet cable plugged in or a power cable. Ideas? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zox Posted July 1, 2005 Share Posted July 1, 2005 Well, that could mean another faulty drive or memory, but for a fun of it, if you already tried suggested things there, try one more thing.Put in OSX CD, hold the "c" key and let it boot from it.When you boot from CD, find "Disk Utiility" or "First Aid" and try scanning and fixing permissions.Third party program might help too, such as Disk Warrior but if your hardware is faulty, no help Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teacher Posted July 1, 2005 Author Share Posted July 1, 2005 Thanks Zox.I asked her for hte CD yesterday as I was going to see if I could get in that way and she left it at her mother's house. If she can get her mother to bring it down here or mail it maybe we can make some progress that way.Since they just replaced the hard drive less than two months ago with the same symptoms (the laptop is about a year old now) then I wonder if there is something wrong with the connections. I don't like the way the area for the hard drive sticks out about a 1/16 of an inch along the bottom of the laptop. She says it has always been that way. Shouldn't it be flush along the bottom of the laptop? She says she has never dropped it or had it fall. Is there a live Linux CD that I can download and burn to test it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zox Posted July 1, 2005 Share Posted July 1, 2005 You can find liveCD for PowerPC in Ubuntu and SystemRescueCD that I know of, probably some others too like Knoppix and Gentoo.Ubuntuhttp://us.releases.ubuntu.com/releases/5.0...ive-powerpc.isoSystemRescueCDhttp://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/systemr....0.iso?download Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
teacher Posted July 1, 2005 Author Share Posted July 1, 2005 Thanks.I burned a copy of the Ubuntu this morning and the Gentoo. It was quick to see with Gentoo I coulo dnot get to the hard drive and the version of gentoo does not have X. Ubuntu had a gui where I could browse around and trying both command line and gui, I could not get to the hard drive. Also the hardware menus showed unknown for almost everything which I thought was strange. It did show that the powerbook had a Toshiba hard drive. That was progress. I think I will have her take it to a mac cafe and have them look at the connectivity to the hard drive as I suspect there is a problem there.Thanks for the assist. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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