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iBook G3 Won't Power On Intermittently

Flag Reply by siamesekitten May 4 @ 9:42 AM

Hi,

I've got a 700MHz iBook G3 (16 VRAM) that worked fine until recently, but now when turned off, won't boot on again until it has sat for a long time (battery does not need to drain, just takes time). Something is happening when I press the power button (I can feel it), but it doesn't turn on and the button doesn't light up.

Once on, it works fine, including sleep and restart, and it passes the Apple Hardware Test with flying colors. It stays on for days with no problem. The problem shows only after it is completely shut down.

When plugged in, the external power supply ring light turns on properly, even when the computer is off and in its non-booting state.

In the ifixit repair area, it talks about the DC-In board, logic board and power supply as being possible causes of boot problems like this, but none of the symptoms described are the same as mine.

Can anyone concretely identify the cause of my problem? If it's the logic board, seems like not worth fixing. If it's the DC-in board, the fix is cheap.

I'm assuming if it were the hard drive, I'd at least get a flashing ? sign when trying to boot?

Thanks

Flag Reply reply by QEIIRepair May 5 @ 9:44 AM

One iBook (G4, but bear with us) we were asked to fix had a fairly similar problem. It would do nothing but make a small noise at start-up. We were baffled. We quickly concluded that this was a logic board problem. Wrong. Several minutes after happening to leave the iBook plugged in to the mains after an attempt to boot it up, it turned on. It was displaying the Username Selection Screen.

It turned out that the small noises were relevant, the iBook had been booting-up behind the screen, the screen only turned on after the entire Mac OS 10.0.3 boot-up procedure had finished. How to solve this problem seems to be to replace the Logic Board. But if you leave your iBook long enough, you might see it turn on. It's up to you whether you can put up with an iBook that pretends it's dead.

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