Laptops :: Powerbook / TiBook Won't Boot Or Run Bootable CD?
Sep 13, 2009
I have a very old PowerBook that did have OSX running on it fine. Recently it has stopped working completely and when you startup it takes you to a blue screen with a question mark and a finder icon flashing on top of a folder. If you give it long enough it will just shut off. I have tried booting from a CD but I can't seem to get that to work. I boot up holding down the option key and it brings me to a window with a picture of my hard drive and a picture of the CD drive but when I click the cd drive and then click the forward button it merely acts like it's refreshing the list and doesn't actually boot from the CD at all. I've also tried holding down C during boot up but it ignores that and just goes to the same old flashing question mark and finder icon screen. The CD I am trying to boot from is the same OSX cd that I originally installed OSX on this computer from so I know it works.
I've searched high and low for any and all alternatives to working with my, shall we say, "experienced" Powerbook Titanium, despite it's age(it's not old, it's chronologically advanced!). After looking things up and being able to think of nothing, I figured I'd finally register here and hope for some good advice from people who possibly know more about Mac hardware than I do.I received my laptop in June of 2002(it was likely bought either that month or April) from my father. As far as I was aware, it was a brand new Powerbook bought from Comp USA...with the latest specs and peripherals at the time. After 7 years of using and loving my laptop(despite the fact the battery is completely dead, both hinges are broken and removed to keep the wires from accidentally being cut until I can afford new ones, and the CD drive no longer working), it's come to a point where I'm needing to try to breath even a little new-found life into my true love...or be stuck using "The Rex", my overbearing Desktop PC with its snooty Windows XP and massive noise-creating fans.
My former, babied, 400mhz overclocked by Daystar to 550mhz Titanium Powerbook has a fried logic board. Can I put a the old low resolution Tibook screen on a 1ghz Tibook body with a higher resolution screen?
Would it just power on at the lower resolution or is this just idiotic?
I have a Powerbook G4 that I bought used a year ago. It has worked perfectly with no problems at all. Yesterday it started going to sleep randomly during use. It would wake up when the space bar is pressed and be fine for a while. This was happening every 10 - 15 minutes. Since yesterday it has gotten worse and worse, happening more and more often, and now it won't even stay awake long enough to click on something. Any ideas of what could be wrong??? I'm sorry I don't know what operating system or anything, I'm not all that Mac savvy.
I have an iBook G4 (14-inch screen, 1.42 Ghz.) and it has a cracked screen. I also have a PowerBook G3 PDQ (14-inch screen, 233Mhz.) with a good screen. Question: Can you swap the screens even if they were made 7ish years apart?
We have about 10 PowerBook G3/400 computers in our school running OS 9.2.2. They haven't been used in a couple of years and now none of them will boot up. No power. I checked Apple's website and found an article called Power Management Unit. It says to hit the reset button, wait 5 seconds and then hit the power button, but it didn't work for any of them. Does anyone have any ideas?
I would like to know if there is a CPU / Processor upgrade option for my laptop. I am max'd out 640 MB of RAM and the processor is heating up often. I am running Leopard 10.5.8
I just acquired a 1 GHz 15" Powerbook Ti. It is in good cosmetic condition except for a few dark marks from the keyboard on the screen. I can feel them with a fingernail, so I know they are residue from the keys. Is there any way these can be removed without damaging the screen? I have had very good results using toothpaste and a damp cloth on other surfaces, but I am leery of using even a very mild abrasive on the screen. I have even used newsprint on some sensitive surfaces with good results but if you make an error on the screen, it is either permanent or expensive. I suppose I could try in a corner but I know there are anti-glare coatings on the screens and I could make things worse. This is most noticeable when there is a light-colored area displayed right under the marks.
I recently inherited a Pismo, 400 mhz and a 6gb hard drive. Other than the tiny hard drive, the computer is in great shape and has a lot of service left in it. I was able to load Tiger on it, and it's working fine. I replaced the hard drive with a 100gb Seagate, but when I tried to format the disk,the new hard drive didn't show up during installation attempts. However, the volume was visible in the system profiler and the disk utility...I reinstalled the original hard drive, and that booted successfully so I guess that means I didn't damage the hard drive cable, which I had feared. Does anyone have an idea about this? So odd that that I could locate the drive in the disk utility but not at the installation screen.
My Titanium powerbook was running when suddenly the screen went crazy, flashing colors and bars, then went blank black. Now can't boot at all, even from external drive. If I hold down the start key I eventually get a faint humming sound and the little "alive" light at the bottom of the display bezel flashes for a short time. If I repeat this it takes at least 15 seconds to happen. I have turned it off for a while and even removed the battery but nothing changes. Can't afford a new one, need help to fix it.
i hava an older powerbook G4 running Mac OS 10.5.8. there is website [URL] which broadcast news and musics. the station is physically located in NY, and some unknown reasons, i am unable to get any radio SOUND from that site. The website works 100% well, without ANY problems whatsoever on ALL and ANY Windows based PC's, but NOT Mac.
My 1999 PowerBook G3 "Lombard" does not start when I press the power button. Is there a way to force it to start without it, or do I need to get a replacement button?
I am running Leopard on a 1st gen macbook. I used boot camp assistant to partition the disk, and then went to install windows. I didn't back up bc I am an ass. Then I got to the part where I had to choose a partition. I reformatted the Boot Camp partition to NTFS. I then realized that the partition is too small. I have to get back into Leopard to fix the partition problem. Now, I can't reboot to Leopard. Holding alt or the apple key or both does not prevent the windows dvd from booting. When I eject the DVD, it tells me "no bootable disk." I never installed Vista. I don't understand how I could have overwritten anything or caused any data loss.
I have OSX installed on a very old Powerbook. Well it was working and then I left it for awhile and now it is giving me the good old folder to question mark screen (maybe someone dropped it?). Well I'm not much of a mac user so I looked up all of the different boot key commands and tried to boot from my OSX CD. Holding down C did nothing, and neither did ANY of the other commands except holding down option and that key command that restarts the computer (apple, option, shift, esc?). Anyway, I got into the screen that shows your hard drive and all other devices and it actually listed the CD drive so I clicked it and clicked the next arrow. I waited for awhile and then the screen reloaded (as if it was rescanning for removable devices) and then stopped and only displayed the local disk. What is going on?! It only sometimes displays the CD in this screen and the next arrow never does anything regardless!!
I really don't know any of the computers stats but if I were to guess they're pretty bad. All I know is it used to run OSX just fine and then other people used it and now it doesn't do anything.
My brother is a windows user and as a gift i thought I'd get him an update to windows 7. I've bought the 32bit upgrade from software4students and selected digital download. Unfortunately it gives me a .exe download manager so i've downloaded the file on a windows pc and now transfered it back to mac as I'm trying to relearn how to do stuff the mac way (fairly new user ). So i now have the following files on my mac:windows 7 32bit imageas a .img file indows boot image as a .00 file Read me file and i want to make a bootable dvd. Disk Utility will let me make a new image from my usb with the files on, which just seems to be creating a .cdr file of everything on the stick. I was looking at the dvd options and it will let me burn the .img file to a dvd but wont let me include the windows boot image. Currently I'm creating a .cdr file of everything and then i'm going to burn that onto the DVD. This didn't work, it created a 16GB .cdr file as it captured all the empty space on my usb stick... Is this going to work? is there a more efficient way of creating this DVD on mac?
I always get this error when I try to boot up to my Windows on Bootcamp: No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key
I installed Windows 7 through Bootcamp and I got everything installed perfectly! I partitioned my Mac's hard drive into 3 before the Windows installation: -Mac OS -Data For Windows -System for Windows itself
It all worked fine and i could drag and drop anything into that Data Hard drive through Windows very easily. However, when I came back to my Mac OS and partitioned my Mac Hard Drive into 2 parts(Which makes 4 partition now) and tried booting back up to my Windows, it gave me that error. I then decided to re-partition it like before which was Mac, Data and Windows. Booted it back to Windows and it gives me the same error again. I have an attached Picture showing how my partitions look now. Does anyone know how to fix it? I think it's because what my Windows is booting from is the Data Hard Drive but not my Windows 7 Hard Drive with the OS on it. Is there a way to change it's place or to tell it which Hard Drive to boot from?
if y'all are kind enough to respond to this, can you keep it in baby language. I have very, very poor knowledge of the world of technology, and jargon will only confuse me! Step by step would really I have a PC I need to reinstall windows xp on, so i downloaded a torrent copy of xp from the net ( i know it's illegal, but i had a licensed copy, and my horrible ex decided to take it when he left, so i don't feel so bad ) onto my mac. I expanded the .rar file, and was left with three icons. one says image.img and has a little pic of the harddrive on it, and has about 650 MB of info. the other two are small (4kb and 24 MB), and just show a blank page icon, and say image.ccd and image.subNow, I assume I need to get those files onto a c.d, which when inserted intomy P.C will automatically begin the install process on my P.C.
So earlier after installing a windows 7 ultimate 64 bit RTM copy into bootcamp, things started acting up;
After installing some updates for 7, rebooting, it took about a minute to get the HD icons up to even choose one, and after that it was fine, except then the windows partition eventually just had a blinking cursor in the top right and stayed there.
I went into OSx, removed the 7 partition completely! my HD is one partition for Osx, but when I boot now, it takes yearsssss to just boot to osx, but if I hold option, then I instantly get a Macintosh HD (that's it) and it will go straight away.
What do I need to do? Reinstall SL? Please god no.
Partitions seem to be all messed up, maybe I will re create a windows install, and remove it again. (Xp this time)
Edit, This happened on 2 different MBP's one a 2.8 duo after I put on 7, they both take forever to boot to OSx. (With no BC partition even on)
I'm trying to install windows xp professional sp3 from an iso I torrented. I burned it to a disc, but my computer can't find the disc during the start of installation ("No bootable device, press any key").
I have a mac mini. I used boot camp Assistant to install windows 7, and to make the partition screen stayed black and I get the following poster: "no bootable device- insert boot disk and press any key".
I want to create a minimal recovery boot disk for SL. I've followed how-to's on creating one for 10.4 and 10.5, but so far it I couldn't get it to work with 10.6. If you have successfully done this, or can point me to a pre-made image or how-to.
I have a Macbook pro and when I turn on the computer the message: "NO bootable devices, insert a boot disk and press any key" appears. I click the button "alt" and I choose the option Macintosh HD and the computer works. But I can't do this procedure always. This problem started after install the Paragon software to save my files on the external hd. How can I fix that?
Not only will holding Option while booting not work, but all of the other boot tricks (safe mode, single user mode, etc), will not work. I am at a loss. I also don't have an optical drive in this particular MBP. I have an SSD where it once was.
I'm receiving the "no boot-able device insert boot disk and press any key" error every time I go to turn on my macbook air. The screen chimes, turns on and then goes black. I've been holding down the option key and that seems to work but do I have to do this every time I turn my computer on from now on?
My PB will no longer boot up. Get past the spinning wheel to the blue screen, then OS X progress bar that never loads. Ran Tech Tool Pro and OS 10.4 disk utility. Repaired permissions, no disk errors. Tried an install but only 1.9 GB of space left on 27GB HD. Installer crashes even with "Upgrade" Install (needs 72MB of space) as Language Install is finishing up. Reset P Ram. I can not "Unmount HD in order to strip disk. How do I show the HD in the Finder (Desktop) when booted off Install Disk? The HD mounts but I can not access it as I did with OS 6,7,8,9.... I can see my Sys, Aps & folders when I select "Create a disk image". Is the HD DOA? Running 10.4.11.
Got a Powerbook G4 with a "messed up" HD. Couldn't fix it, so got a firewire drive and ran a bunch of utilities from my newer intel iMac. Cloned the Powerbook's drive to a USB hard drive, did all repairs on the USB drive, formatted the Powerbook, cloned the USB drive BACK to the Powerbook, but it just gives me the flashing question mark when I try to boot.
What is REALLY weird is I can boot my iMac FROM THE CLONE ON THE USB DRIVE and it works fine.In Drive Genius the Powerbook drive (in TDM) shows as a single drive, but if I go to "Repartition" then it shows 3 smaller partitions on the drive; I believe they're called "Apple Free Space" or something like that (can't check right now, I'm running Repair on it AGAIN at the moment).
I feel like I'm missing something simple, like the machine just doesn't see one thing that tells it "Oh, yeah! There's an operating system on this drive!" I have tried partitioning from Drive Genius and Disk Utility. Have done clones back and forth with Drive Genius, Disk Utility, and Carbon Copy Cloner. Same results each time.
I'm going to be testing a 1.83 GHz Macbook with a bad hard drive and optical drive offered for sale. How can I boot from a USB flashdisk? I have a retail version of OS 10.4 on a DVD, but obviously I can't use it on this machine because of the bad DVD drive. I can, however, copy the contents of the DVD to a USB flashdisk using another Mac.
I'm considering buying an old G3 500 Mhz laptop. Seller says it can't boot by itself, either through its own hard drive or an OS Panther installer in the cd drive. It does give the welcome chime but the screen then displays the folder with the question mark. So it's either the hard drive or the logic board. Anybody try to boot off the cd thru an external cd drive (with its own external power supply)? There is no firewire port on this model. Yeah I know I'm supposed to press the option key before the welcome chime.
