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the iBook in the ICU

So the iBook G3.
Some combination of age, carrying it back and forth to work the last couple days, the fact it was raining one of those days, and using it tilted in my lap appear to have caused it deep distress.

Friday night I think I tried it and it wouldn't boot.
Then very flaky, like shake it and it might boot partially, wierd video display.
Anyway, I did eventually get it booted up sitting on the table, and left it overnight.
It was fine in the morning.

Started torrenting.
Froze after torrenting for several hours I think.

Went into emergency mode, bought external harddrive.
Err ok yes, I already have two external harddrives, but they are both Windows formatted. I got a third Maxtor 200, Mac formatted, for direct partition clone.

I tried a straight copy and then it died.
And it was dead for quite a while.
I tried many many things.
Including removing the wireless card and extra RAM.

I tried to see if it was just the HD, but it won't boot from DiskWarrior in the CD drive either.

I decided to use the "if I buy a new computer, the old one will start working" theory. So I have bought a PowerBook G4 12".

Then, after many hours, I eventually discovered it will boot if tilted at a 45 degree angle. I don't know if you can fully appreciate how insane you have to be to get a non-booting laptop to finally boot. You would think a person would give up after a few hundred times pushing the power button and having nothing happen. Fortunately, my obsession triumphed.



As mentioned in my previous post, I eventually ended up using SuperDuper to clone the OS X and OS 9 partitions. You know what is very slow? Copying gigs of data. I guess I have distorted expectations. In my mind, 30 GB should take maybe 10 minutes tops. In reality, it took about 1.5 hours to copy the 32GB in the main OS X partition (via Firewire 400 to the external drive). Our i/o speed is not matched with our storage :(

So I'm not sure what to do with the iBook now.
Should I disassemble it?
DiskWarrior the disk?
Take it in for repair? posted by Richard at 08:42 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)