⟐ Commented May 14, 2023 at 19:12 MST

How can I unlock it again without having to dismantle the whole thing, is there a way? At least, it seems to me that when you remove the heat shield you can see the interior of the module. But I don't know what to look for.

Any help is much appreciated. It's the first time this happens to me, and while I can still use the inferior slot, I would like to use them both.

Thank you!

Ok, after a couple hours I learnt that you can use the little hole beside the slot, not only to release a card but also, to release a locked mechanism. So I inserted the end of a paperclip, heard a noise "Ding" and it was working as always again…

Hope this helps someone.

⟐ Edited by author April 15, 2023 at 15:21 MST

Află totul despre munca actorilor și a actrițelor din aceste seriale, alături de povești lor deosebite de viață. Citește despre obiceiuri vechi sau noi, tradiții turcești, viața de familie, istorie, artă și multe altele doar urmărind aceste seriale.

⟐ Edited by author April 29, 2021 at 10:50 MST

This is what happens. It has no hdd(but it should show? sign, right) the ram was tested in other tibook and works. What should I do?

When i push the power button and keep my hands of the machine, let him doing its thing, the screen stayes black after the boing, you can hear the hard drive clicking away reading and booting the machine up, there is no grey screen with apple logo and spinning loading wheel under it (fresh install of 10.4 tiger of an original apple retail dvd, not a burned copy), and when the os is about to finish booting, the screen lights up finally with a blue blackground, than the small box with “Starting Mac OS'“ appears and it boots straight to the desktop, the screen dims a bit because of the ambient light sensors (those work fine), but once on the desktop, i can’t move the cursor with the trackpad and the keyboard is not responding, the caps lock light will light up when i push it, so does the num-lock key (F6), when i push the power button, it responds and asks me what i want to do (restart, shutdown etc.).

Now, let the weirdness begin!

When i power on the laptop (cold boot) with the following keys Option-Command-O-F all held in at the same time, it gets into Open Firmware, no errors here to be seen, its just your regular time and date and copyright info followed with a prompt, when i push all the keys, they all appear, all the numbers and symbol do work. But when i type mac-boot, the screen stays grey, again, no apple logo and spinning loading wheel, when its fully booted, no keyboard and trackpad, only external devices work!

Powering on the laptop with the option key pushed down, shows me a blue screen with my hard drive and optical drive (tiger dvd is still in there), i can move the pointer and the arrow keys do work, but when i choose either of the boot devices, again, grey screen, no apple logo/spinning loading wheel until, or the installer, or the hard drive, boots, with, yes, no keyboard or trackpad.

Powering the laptop on with the shift key pushed down: the screen stays black until tiger is almost done booting, blue screen with a dialog box prompting me to put in the password of the account (empty) with the red text “safe boot” on the top! Once again, no keyboard and trackpad!

I tried everything, changed the topcase with a known good one, booted it up on battery alone as well as only plugged in without battery, changed the pram/usb board, changed os (leopard doesn’t want to boot at all, even with 2gb of ram installed), changed optical drives, changed ram, changed hard drive, swapped cables from other working laptop (i own several broken powerbooks with good parts), nothing what i do resolves this issue, tried zapping pram, pmu, did the reset-nvram, set-defaults, reset all commands in to the open firmware, nothing works, i am baffled in what this could be! Do you know the answer? I tried really every troubleshooting step i could think off. Its driving me crazy because i want this machine to just work, its the only good working model i have!

The display works fine, but the extra pixels on the screen are quite strange (see picture). As you can see in the extra pixels to the bottom, the top of the screen ends up getting repeated (and actually updates as the top changes); the right side is filled with gibberish.

I tried seeing if I could use SwitchResX v. 4.3.6 (the last PPC version) to try and force it to use the full screen, but I can’t seem to figure it out. When I try to create a custom resolution of 1280x854, 60Hz, SwitchResX gives me a message that it is, “Not Activated - invalid?”.

I include the exported EDID as well.

As a note, when I boot my computer, before the OS loads in, like when I hold Option on startup to select my startup drive, it does use the whole screen. So I do know that it is possible for my PowerBook to drive the larger screen.

Hopefully someone can help me figure out how to use the whole screen?

Let me know if you need to see other details. Thanks so much!

Photo of the screen as I see it:

The Display Information from the LCD:

The Current (default) Resolutions for 1152x768 which says it is scaled:

I’m wondering if someone has a true Titanium PowerBook G4 DVI which could show me what the settings are for their 1280x854 resolution? Maybe I can then copy that and it will work?

The EDID for 1280x854 LCD:

EDID report generated by SwitchResX Version 4.3.6 (PowerPC - 32-bit) for display LCD Display

-----------------------------------------------------
------------------- RAW DATA ------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------
      0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  A  B  C  D  E  F
-----------------------------------------------------
0  | 00 FF FF FF FF FF FF 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
1  | 0A 0A 01 01 0C 1E 17 BE E8 2D C9 A0 57 47 98 27
2  | 12 48 4C 00 00 00 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
3  | 01 01 01 01 01 01 00 00 00 FE 00 53 52 58 46 61
4  | 6B 65 45 44 49 44 0A 20 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
5  | 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
6  | 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01
7  | 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 01 00 78

-----------------------------------------------------
 <  00FFFFFF FFFFFF00 00000000 00000000 0A0A0101 0C1E17BE E82DC9A0 57479827 12484C00 00000101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010000 00FE0053 52584661 6B654544 49440A20 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010101 01010078    >

-----------------------------------------------------
 {  0x00, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF,  0xFF, 0xFF, 0xFF, 0x00,  0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,  0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00,  0x0A, 0x0A, 0x01, 0x01,  0x0C, 0x1E, 0x17, 0xBE,  0xE8, 0x2D, 0xC9, 0xA0,  0x57, 0x47, 0x98, 0x27,  0x12, 0x48, 0x4C, 0x00,  0x00, 0x00, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x00, 0x00,  0x00, 0xFE, 0x00, 0x53,  0x52, 0x58, 0x46, 0x61,  0x6B, 0x65, 0x45, 0x44,  0x49, 0x44, 0x0A, 0x20,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x01, 0x01,  0x01, 0x01, 0x00, 0x78,     }

-----------------------------------------------------
    Valid EDID block: checksum passed

-----------------------------------------------------
------------------- MAIN EDID BLOCK -----------------
-----------------------------------------------------

EDID Version........1.1
Manufacturer........@@@
Product Code........0 (0000) (0000)
Serial Number.......00000000

Manufactured........Week 10 of year 2000
Max H Size..........30 cm
Max V Size..........23 cm
Gamma...............2.90

Display Supported Features:
---------------------------
    Power Management: Active off    Power Management: Suspend    Power Management: Standby

Display type:
-------------
    RGB color display
    Display is non continuous frequency
    Default color space is not sRGB standard

Input signal & sync:
--------------------
Analog input with:     0.700V / 0.300V
    Separate Sync
    Composite Sync

Color info:
-----------
Red x = 0.625  Green x = 0.280  Blue x = 0.155  White x = 0.283
Red y = 0.342  Green y = 0.595  Blue y = 0.070  White y = 0.298

Established Timings:
--------------------

Manufacturer Reserved Timings:
------------------------------

Standard Timing Identification:
-------------------------------

Monitor Description blocks:
---------------------------
    Descriptor #0 - ASCII data:
            SRXFakeEDID

    Descriptor #1 - Empty descriptor

    Descriptor #2 - Empty descriptor

    Descriptor #3 - Empty descriptor

Thank you

Things I’ve checked:

• the charger is a 45W unit, but works fine with my other laptops (17” PB, 12” iBook)
• moving, rotating the charger doesn’t help
• bought a cheap similar unit for parts only, exchanged their keyboards, but the problem persists
• no fan noise or lights came up, so the logic board is not powered when I try
• tried to turn it on without the keyboard by shorting the power pads on the logic board. Didn’t help.

Has anybody a clue how to fix it? What should I check? I’m not expert and don’t have other tools than a multimeter and screwdrivers, but try to do my best.

⟐ Edited by author April 28, 2020 at 8:41 MST

I recently acquired a Powerbook G4. Whenever I go to turn it on, I hear the chime, the DVD drive makes a noise and then nothing happens - the fans don’t start, the hard drive doesn’t spin up, and the screen stays black, but it is still on. I’ve tried resetting the PRAM but it didn’t work, anyone have any ideas? Is it the PRAM battery? The caps lock light won’t come on either, I’ve tried two different keyboards.

Many thanks

⟐ Edited by author April 21, 2020 at 12:20 MST

This PowerBook used to have a working charging decent battery but now the battery won’t recognise and the power adapter light stays green I am pretty advanced but I’m stumped now what I’ve tried is

resetting pmu (but sometimes the time resets randomly back to 1969 sometimes not all the time though)

swapping battery

swapping dc to dc board

testing voltages that go to the battery coming from the dc to dc board yielded a weird find I thought the outer two pins that connect to the battery were supposed to be grounded but only one the outer pins is grounded and the pin next to the one that isn’t grounded is 0 volts and one of the pins is 2.25 volts and the rest of the inner ones are about normal at 3.5

i have heard that the dc in board might be the culprit but how that just gives dc energy to the board dosent it? and I’ve also tested the voltages going into the dc to dc board (before I swapped it) and every thing was normal but it still won’t recognise the battery

please help or leave a comment if you have any questions

⟐ Reopened July 24, 2020 at 8:37 MST

After a two week process of soaking everything in vinegar and isopropanol, I plugged the laptop into the wall (with the battery removed, of course). It made a noise reminiscent of static, and showed no other signs of life. I unplugged it and replugged it; it didn’t make the static noise again, but it still wouldn’t boot. The HDD did not spin up, and the display (obviously) did not turn on.

I’m hoping it’s fixable, but I’m pretty sure the logic board is fried. Any help would be much appreciated. Thank you.

EDIT: After leaving it unplugged for a day and trying to start it up again, it started making the static noise again. Only the first few cycles of unplugging/replugging it, did it make the noise, however. (Note that “the static noise” is about half a second of static coming from the speaker built into the monitor)

⟐ Commented January 20, 2019 at 1:29 MST

After waiting a few days for a hard drive, I installed the hard drive and plugged it in and tried to turn it on. Nothing happened.

I have been trying to get it to do something, and it is totally lifeless. I press the power button and absolutely nothing happens. I've tried holding it and nothing. Tried turning it on without the RAM, without the hard drive, without the battery, and nothing works.

I want to try to test the power adapter, but I'm not exactly sure how to do it without arcing the positive to negative in the connector. I hear the adapter itself whistle sometimes if I listen closely, but it doesn't do it all the time. Maybe it's faulty? It's an aftermarket charger from eBay.

And yes, it is a 65W charger.

After trying again to get it to work just now, I noticed a small "zap" or "click" sound coming from around the power button area on the palmrest, obviously from inside the computer. I can't tell, it may be the Superdrive, but it sounds further towards the display than that.

It's consistent, giving a small "zap" sound every couple seconds while the charger is plugged in. It's very strange, and with all the Macbooks I've had, I've never had this happen before.

Any ideas as to why this thing won't turn on?

Update- I did notice that when I press on the keyboard/palmrest main connector a little bit (feels kind of loose) I got the power light to flicker. I think my problem may be with the connector for the keyboard.

Update... I tried control + option + shift + power button for 10 seconds, then pressed the power button and the white light lit up for a second and cut off abruptly. After trying it again, I got no response.

I tried once again without the hard drive installed and no changes... couldn't get it to light up again.

I checked the PRAM battery and it's puffed up. Could that be the problem? When the computer is plugged in there is a buzzing noise coming from it like it's getting/giving power, but I don't know if that's good or bad.

⟐ Commented July 19, 2018 at 16:39 MST