⟐ Commented May 01, 2020 at 19:03 MST

After five years of use and abuse, my old PowerBook is showing its age. The DVD drive, main battery, and the PRAM battery are dead; and the LCD backlight, latch, and hinge are failing.

Because I can't justify the cost of the replacement battery and such, and due to the damaged LCD panel and hinge, I plan to use it as a small desktop Mac, with an external display, keyboard/mouse, and DVD drive attached. To prevent overheating, I would like to remove the LCD panel entirely. This way, I can simply place the "headless PowerBook" upright in a stand, behind an external 17" LCD monitor I have - a sort of "DIY iMac".

However, once I pull the LCD panel assembly out (Via this tutorial) is there anything I need to do to operate it safely without the panel? For example, do I need to make a cover for the back of the computer? What do I do with the monitor data and grounding cable?

Thanks for any tips!

⟐ Answer edited September 12, 2014 at 6:45 MST

What happens now:

• Power cable light stays green whichever battery is installed
• Menu bar battery icon shows power plugged in, 0% charge for both batteries
• If I shutdown, unplug power, plug it back in, and startup I get a "You're computer's clock is set to a date before March 24 2001, etc." warning dialog
• Sometimes when I restart or swap batteries the power cable will go orange for a few seconds but the Menu Bar icon never moves off 0% and the cable always goes green after a few seconds

Battery #1

• Charge remaining (mAh): 0
• Charging: No
• Full charge capacity (mAh): 1973
• Health Information:
• Cycle count: 334
• Condition: Good
• Battery Installed: Yes
• Amperage (mA): 0
• Voltage (mV): 4133

Battery #2

• Charge Information:
• Charge remaining (mAh): 0
• Charging: No
• Full charge capacity (mAh): 943
• Health Information:
• Cycle count: 0
• Condition: Good
• Battery Installed: Yes
• Amperage (mA): 0
• Voltage (mV): 7529

What I've tried:

1. Resetting PMU
2. Lots of battery swapping and cable jiggling

Suggestions? I have to open the computer to replace a noisy fan anyway so replacing stuff inside is not a problem.

Does the clock issue represent a PRAM battery failure? Could that cause the main battery to not charge? Maybe the PMU reset doesn't work without a functional PRAM battery?

⟐ Answered April 17, 2011 at 8:40 MST

⟐ Answer deleted February 24, 2016 at 14:48 MST

Occasionally, just randomly, the screen will light up with no external video attached, but it seems to be about one of 10 attempts, and like I stated, randomly, and not in response to anything in particular.

I'd hate to conclude that this is a bad board, and it seems like there must be a fix. It seems as if something is "stuck". Anyone know how to reset the PRAM without the keyboard? There are power and PMU power-on pads, but none for PRAM that I know of.

Thanks

⟐ Commented July 09, 2012 at 8:57 MST

I have a damaged 60gb ide drive that I'm trying to recover data from. Ideally I would want some software that could clone the current drive and copy it onto a new drive which is bigger than the old one. A program that I could run from windows would also be excellent.

Many thanks,

Joel Spencer

⟐ Answered August 20, 2025 at 5:11 MST

• Onset of the problem was instantaneous and occurred while I was simply looking at the display, without touching the computer.

• The display shows normal and distorted colors at the same time: in some places bright green exchanged for black, purple for white, etc. Color positions don't change unless a window is opened or the window/menu arrangement changes.

• Windows are continually surrounded by "splash rings," similar to what you see when you open a widget in Dashboard, but frozen in one state.

• Strangely, I can sometimes see the (color-distorted) contents of one window showing through the background of another window that's in front of it, even though those same contents cannot be seen while observing through Screen Sharing.

• Faint "dancing" horizontal lines are barely noticeable in the brighter parts of the display.

• Component colors seem to have their rasters displaced relative to one another, like a color comic strip that was not registered properly when printed.

Screen Image

Note that some text was visually edited out for privacy.

Other observations

• Windows, menus, and backgrounds seen through Screen Sharing are all perfectly normal.

• I have not yet tried an external monitor -- hopefully I'll have one set up today.

Steps taken so far

• Reset PRAM -- no change.

• Reset PMU/NVRAM -- no change.

• Booted from separate system on external drive (to detect possible corrupt system color table or other system software problem) -- no change.

• Shined light through Apple logo with the internal backlight lamp turned off. I noticed same color distortion problem (so it seems that the backlight is not the problem).

Suspicions

Having read other trouble reports here related to displays, I suspect that the display cable is the most likely problem, though I am concerned that the problem might actually be with the logic board or other circuitry that drives the display.

Finally, my questions...

• Should I replace the display cable?

• If not, what else should I do, and why?

• If so, what tips might you offer for best success?

Thank you for your time, interest, and help in solving this problem!!

⟐ Answered July 28, 2011 at 6:32 MST

⟐ Commented August 04, 2015 at 15:59 MST

I insert the only install disk I have which is actually for my MacBook Pro (this could be the problem-I don't have the original one as this is a second hand lap top) and hold down "option" as it starts up and this is the screen that greets me:

What am I doing wrong? Did I need to replace the hard drive? Do I need a different os install disk?

It should also be noted that it's a very old laptop (I think circa 2004) so I have also been wondering if perhaps the dvd drive is faulty or can't read the disk that the os install is on.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

⟐ Answer accepted June 19, 2015 at 4:18 MST

Thanks, rdklinc. On your advice, I connected an external monitor. No signal. The CD was inserted AFTER the problem started (I thought maybe the CD had a system on it, and maybe could boot from that if the hard drive was bad), so I'm pretty sure the problem is not the CD. This machine has only a single 512K bank or RAM. I just tried re-seating it, and that didn't change anything.

The screen is completely black the whole time. Same results with and without the battery. Just tried the flashlight trick, and I'm not seeing any faint image. Same results holding the option key down while booting.

You speak of resetting the both PMU and the PRAM. What I have done is remove power and battery and hold (5 seconds) the power key then release. I've also done the shift-option-command-start press and release, and wait five seconds. I think either or both of these will reset the PMU. I've also pressed start and then (quickly) held down option-command-P-R. I'm not sure that is working, because I get only one "bong" tone, and I think it should give me at least two.

What seems so strange is that the caps lock light will not come on. Does that mean the PMU is not running? The little white light on the screen latch button does light as soon as the "on" button is pressed, but the caps lock light will not respond at all. Sure do hope this is not a video chip/logic board issue--logic boards are very expensive, I see.

Thanks so much for your help.

⟐ Answered January 07, 2025 at 9:50 MST

⟐ Commented March 25, 2020 at 19:58 MST

Thank you for all your time, and I look forward to any replies to this post!

⟐ Answer accepted October 26, 2013 at 3:43 MST

I have tried to use a (new) OS X 10.4 install disk and only get the same results. However when holding down the option key at start up, I get a blue screen with an icon of the hard drive and the install disk and both icons have a small x on them, what does that mean? When using the hardware test disk, only the hard drive icon has the x.

Where do I start looking for the problem for this mac? Hard drive?

⟐ Commented October 18, 2022 at 14:29 MST

I noticed on the 1.33GHz board that it said "Works only in the 12" 1.33 GHz Aluminum G4. This part will NOT work as an upgrade for an 867 MHz or 1 GHz 12" Aluminum" However this notice does not appear to be on the page for the 1GHz logic board.

⟐ Answer accepted January 22, 2014 at 4:30 MST

⟐ Answer edited December 14, 2018 at 12:25 MST

⟐ Answer accepted May 16, 2018 at 16:18 MST

I tried to…

…restart with no extensions (Shift key). Same result.

…restart after NV PRAM reset (Cmd-Opt-P-R). Start-up chime and restart, but then the same result as before.

…restart after Power Management Unit reset. Same result.

…restart into Single User Mode (Cmd-S). Same result (i.e., failed to enter SUM).

…restart into Open Firmware Mode (Cmd-Opt-O-F). Succeeded entering the Open Firmware console, but reboot afterward yielded the same result as before.

…boot from Mac OS X on an external Firewire disk. Succeeded, but internal HD did not mount.

…inspect the internal HD with Disk Utility. Disk appeared, but would not mount.

…run Repair Disk on the internal HD. Test began but failed after reporting working on catalog.

…run DiskWarrior to recreate the disk directory. The process took several hours due to reported hardware malfunctions and completed with a report of 0 directories and 0 files in the "rebuilt" directory.

I am considering removing the existing internal hard drive and replacing it with a new drive, and placing the old drive in an external HD enclosure and testing it there. My questions, then, are:

1. What else might you recommend i do to solve the problem without removing the internal drive?

2. Is it possible this could be a logic board problem? The fact that DiskWarrior detected no directories or files whatsoever, even though it saw the drive present, signals that the drive may not be communicating through the logic board at all. How might I further isolate the problem to either the board or the drive?

3. What external enclosure would you recommend for the internal drive if I remove it?

4. If it is the hard drive that has gone bad, what data recovery service(s) might you recommend?

Thanks very much for considering this problem.

⟐ Answer accepted January 13, 2018 at 8:52 MST

booted in verbose mode and the last lines read:

Wed Jan 8 19:14:49 PST 2003; root: xnu/xnu-344.16.8.obj~5/RELEASE_ PPC

panic: We are hanging here...

any ideas? thank you

⟐ Answered July 22, 2010 at 19:10 MST

⟐ Answer accepted February 10, 2010 at 7:31 MST

⟐ Answer accepted December 02, 2013 at 20:41 MST