Hi,
I'm looking at an ibook for a friend that goes to a blue screen on startup whether booting from the HD or the OSX install CD.
The spec is 14.1 in screen, 1 GHz, 768 MB RAM, combo drive, airport, bluetooth, 60 G HD - manufactured in 2004.
It will sometimes boot to safemode.
I have reset nvram and pram.
It will boot to firewire mode and I can access the HD and the files on the install DVD when it is in the drive.
I've removed the additional RAM and it booted up from the HD but froze a couple of minutes later. It would only boot to a blue screen after that.
In firewire disc mode the screen sometimes will cycle through white, grey, blue, red, green and black, not necessarily in that order. It has done that on another occasion also when not in fireware disk mode.
I have been able to boot it to the apple hardware test and run that once. It indicated no problems but I had removed a ram chip. Probably need to put that back and run it again, but as the problem is still present that probably isn't it.
I've booted into verbose mode and attempted to detect at what point the problem occurs and also checked the console logs but can't see anything obvious.
It does seem to boot into safe mode or normally if it has been left to sit for a few minutes. But will crash fairly soon afterwards.
I have read that there can be problems with connections on/to the logic board in some ibooks or just a plain faulty logic board in quite a few. It would seem possible that there is a problem with this ibook possibly due to thermal expansion. That might explain why it starts up after having been left off for a few minutes and why it crashes soon after starting up.
Does anyone have any knowledge of that specific problem or know what is indicated by the screen cycling through the different colours described above.
I did read a description of someone adding a "shim" to ensure continued contact. Any idea whether that is possible here.
Any advice gratefully appreciated.
John
PS. Have just booted from the install DVD after leaving for a few minutes. Also when booting normally the apple logo is displayed with the spinning cog below but logo is replaced by a pixellated square halfware through the boot sequence. It will complete the boot sequence and finish booting. Wondering whether that indicates some corruption of the boot sequence. Haven't tried reinstalling yet because I think this is a hardware problem but may have to do that to eliminate problems with system software.
