PowerPC :: Powerbook G4 1.67GHz - Random Hard Freezes
Oct 4, 2007
My girlfriend has a 17" G4 Powerbook - she recently bought it second hand. It's one of the late models, with a 1.67 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM installed. It runs like a dream, except for one thing - it has a propensity to freeze occasionally. They're not kernel panics - they're hard freezes, where everything locks up completely. Can't move the mouse, can't force quit, nothing - the only thing to do is switch off and on again. I've looked through the logs and can't find any crash reports, so I'm at a loss to what's causing this. The only lead I have is that it only seems to happen when the machine's running on battery - it's never frozen when the power cord's plugged in. I thought it might be overheating, but it froze this morning after only 5 mins of use, so now I'm stumped.
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May 3, 2008
Hoping that some of you here still own or have owned Powerbooks recently... I have a PB G4 1.67ghz that I bought in July 2005. Since then, it's seen the back of the Apple Store several times to replace three logic boards, a screen, and a SuperDrive, with the most recent instance being the third logic board replacement. This has left the future of my laptop in uncertainty, as the warranty expires this July. In the past, I've owned several Macs for 5 years or more, including my beloved G4 Cube, so I'm no stranger to sticking with my Mac until it's absolutely necessary to upgrade... and financially, I was planning for this computer to last me another 2 years before I had to upgrade.
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Sep 27, 2009
Hello, I have a 17" Powerbook G4 1.67ghz with the ATI 9700 128mb video card and 1600x1050 screen. I am running Leopard 10.5.8. I love the computer but the video playback on it is terrible. Even youtube videos are choppy. I can watch standard definition video files but not 720p. It there anything I can do or it is just a limitation of the G4 chip and time to upgrade to an intel?
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Jun 15, 2010
I have a 15" PB Aluminum 1.5ghz with 1GB of ram. Just bought off a friend and when I did a fresh erase and install of OS X 10.4, repaired permissions and rebooted I get the kernel error telling me to hold down the power button and restart. So I did this and when it restarts I get the grey apple background with a load of writing all over it. How do I try and figure out what is causing the problem. I also ran tech tool pro from the DVD and that says everything has passed such as processor, memory etc
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Oct 2, 2006
I have a 1.8Ghz dual processor G5, 1GB Ram, 80GB HDD, with OS X 10.4.7 installed and all current updates, and today I was working on it and the fans on it slowly started speeding up, and then everything on the screen disappeared and a mesage appeared stating that a restart was required. After restarting everything seems to be working fine, but I'd like to know if this is a fluke or if I have a serious problem.
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Dec 13, 2006
i'm having some old school os 8/9 crashes -- everything just freezes up. no kernal panic screen, i can't move the mouse, the keyboard doesn't even respond so i can't apple-ctrl-pwr to reboot, i have to hold down the power button to shut it off.
this is the second time it has happened in the past 2 weeks. any ideas?
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Dec 26, 2006
I have trided to upgrade the hard drive on my G4 15" powerbook. The ribon conector from the drive to the board has come free from the board and I don't know how to refasten it.
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Jun 22, 2008
Could really use some advice on a PowerBook problem! Unfortunately the PowerBook in question (12" G4) belongs to my mum who lives a fair distance away, so I've not been able to do any 'hands on' diagnostics. Basically she was using the machine yesterday when it randomly started emitting a high pitched squeaking/scratching sound (she described it as screaming though, bless). She called me and I asked her to turn it off - gave it a couple of minutes and asked her to try turning it on again. When she did the computer immediately started making the same noises (even before the startup 'bong' sound). Today one of her friends who is a little tech savvy took a look at it, and figured it must be the hard drive. Fortunately he was able to retrieve all of the important data from the computer whilst enduring ear-splitting screeching.
1. Does it sound like the problem really is the hard drive? It does to me, though I'm not an expert - however would hate to waste money on a replacement drive to find out that wasn't the problem in the first place.
2. Is it worth replacing the drive? Any idea how much it would cost to replace the disk? Is it something that could be done by myself, or would we need to find a specialist repair person to do it? Would it likely be more cost effective to get a new laptop?
The money issue is pretty key as she's in something of a tight spot at the moment, so trying to find the cheapest solution that will get her computer working again asap. As she lives in a rural area and is housebound her laptop is very much a lifeline for her, so would be good to get it sorted.
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Jun 1, 2009
my powerbook g4 titanium hard drive was makin weird noise and then it died and I can't get into operating system. now when I power on my laptop it only shows now a square with a smile face and a question mark. if I buy a new hard drive on ebay how do I install the OS on the hard drive? is it hard? will I be able to install it by myself? is there a website with the steps how to install the OS?
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Sep 18, 2009
A few months ago it was dropped and would not boot past the Apple screen. I presumed it was faulty from the fall and instead of repairing it I figured I would just buy a new computer.
Anyway I have just purchased a new MBP 13" and I'm trying to get everything off my old laptop. It is going into target disk mode but the MBP isn't picking it up.
It is finding it in the disk utility but its just showing the beachball. To make matters worse I can't boot from a CD as the Superdrive is just chucking out CD's (guessing its bent from the fall).
Guessing its dead and Im going to have to try and get it data recovered, just seeing if there are any other ideas?
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Oct 5, 2007
My PowerBook G4 has been slowly dieing over the last couple of month, ever since I told it was going to get replaced with a MacBook Pro early next year (hopefully around MacWorld). The Airport signal is slowly decreasing and I'm in the same room as the wireless router, the mouse touchpad in parts is loosing sensitivity, there are randomly hard freezes of the system, etc.
But over the last couple of days I have noticed a strange noise coming from the fan (well that's guess), it sounds like its sighing, I know it sound ridiculous but it's the only thing it reminds me off. It comes and goes (the sighing) but it is constant and it's really starting to: 1) Freak me out that my computer could die and day, 2) Annoy me. I have a sound clip (.amr - also converted to .mov) does anyone know how i can upload it onto here or a link, so people can hear what I'm experiencing.
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Nov 4, 2008
I keep seeing my poor iMac G3 Blueberry freezing for no reason, I have 512MB of ram, but I don't think I can max it, and if I did, the processor and hard drive and gonna die soon, It just freezes, and sometimes the screen will not wake when I move the mouse or touch the keyboard.
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Mar 26, 2007
A while back I bought an external hard drive for my PC, but then ditched the PC and decided to hook up the hard drive to my Mac. My External Hard Drive is a: 149.1 GB WDC WD 16 00JB-00GVA0 The problem is, I can access all the information but it will not let me do anything on the external harddrive (Like creating a file, copying and pasting a file on there, etc.) However, I can save Torrent downloads on the harddrive, but they do not show up on the actual external hard drive. But, when I press the "Find/Show directory" button in Bittorrent it does find the files. Is there something I need to do, Or is it just incompatible with my Mac?
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Nov 25, 2009
I'm a new Mac user for about 6 months now. I bought a used PowerBook G4 15" 1.25 ghz notebook that was in good condition. It was well cared for by the previous owner. Only thing she had done was update the ram to 2 gigs.Recently I began to notice it running slower, programs were freezing and Garage Band couldn't run as many tracks. I installed recommended software updates before it started to get slower and I thought maybe that was the problem.So I attempted to do a fresh swipe of the hard drive and start from nothing. I saved some files and then tried to run the software installation cd. It didn't really help at all. I can't remember the error but it wouldn't let me reinstall OS X even when I held "c" when starting up. At one point I must have clicked run in target mode because I booted it up and it showed an unfamiliar screen. Then I restarted it once again and saw on Disk Utility that S.M.A.R.T. said something about hard drive failure.
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Mar 13, 2010
to run ppc g4 powerbook from external hard drive with apps from external hd drive intel imac g5? I have a firewire hd but it is not being recognized by the ppc.
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Feb 11, 2006
I recently installed a new 250 GB hard drive in my 800MHZ emac. I did a nice clean install of 10.4 on it and all was going well. The problem is that it randomly freezes after about 10 or 20 minutes. Mouse locks up, keyboard doesn't work.I tried pinging it from another computer and there was no response. I hold the power button in to shut it down and when it reboots it works fine for a while and then freezes again. I checked the console and it had this:
Mac OS X Version 10.4 (Build 8A428) 2006-02-10 20:36:25 -0500 2006-02-10 20:36:26.072 loginwindow[84] FSResolveAliasWithMountFlags returned err = -1407
I ran the disk utilty checks and they come up clean. I have tried reinstalling os x with no luck.
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Sep 9, 2008
In the last week or so i have been experiencing lock ups every 15-20 minutes, which last for around a minute. The problem has only presented itself after I moved to a dual monitor configuration, although this may be coincidental, given the nature of the problem. The problem only seems to occur when the system is reading from from the main hard disk however testing the disk (and performing a directory/file test) says that the disk (and all others in the system) are functioning properly.
Curiously, any audio playing at the time, regardless of the application it originates from, continues to play while the rest of the system is unresponsive. It also appears as if the keyboard and mouse are disconnected during this time, and the power lights on each begin to flash, and the Caps lock key no longer lights up. I would like to avoid replacing the system disk if at all possible, as i have already had to do this three times since last December, when i purchased the system, due to drives developing faults.
2x Dual-Core Xeon 2GHz
1GB RAM
NVidia GeForce 8800 GT
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Feb 8, 2010
The issue I'm having is very weird taking into consideration that I just upgraded my hardware two months ago. I have an Intel X-25M SSD as my boot drive for OSX and a 1.5TB WD HDD with my Home Folder on it. Whenever, I launch an app it never launches immediately. I get a beachball that lasts about 5 seconds. When I try shutting down the computer I have to hit shutdown about 3-4 times before it does. Otherwise, it warns me with a message thats something like this: System cannot logout of user account because Safari is still in use. (but it's closed). Launching an app from an ssd should be instantaneous. So I don't understand if it is a hardware or software issue. I reset the PRAM ... helped for about a day but I'm back to the slowdowns. Any ideas. Also when I performed a software update for iTunes, the update installed but I got this warning so I have a feeling something is wrong.
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Oct 13, 2009
Since I use Snow Leopard I get randomly (around 1 to 10 ) freezes. When I get it I can click some applications but can't make changes in it. The beachball keeps spinning for some seconds and after the wait I can just continue working. I first thought it was Firefox, because it almost everytime happens when I am browsing the web, but I get the same with Safari.
It's getting verry annoying now :-(
I already checked:
- Repair disk
- Repair disk permissions
- Run Apple diagnostics
Repairs my 1.5 year old mbp already had:
- 2x keyboard
- Topcase
- Logicboard
- Superdrive
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Apr 23, 2012
I am getting random multiple freezes of programs and finder 10.6.8 imac11,1, 2.66 intel core i5, 27inch requiring a restart. Doesn't seem to matter what the programs are running and sometimes can't get a program to completely quit with force quit.
Info:
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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Feb 4, 2009
The last 2 days my iMac has completely frozen on me at random times. Frozen meaning, no mouse movement, no keyboard activity (caps lock not responding) and no OSX activity whatsoever. Temp at the time 41C, CPU Usage at 21% or smth, Fan speed at around 1200rpm. However, I don't get the infamous kernel panic error. I haven't changed anything hardware wise. I did have a couple of months ago the graphics glitch problem. Last software update was the iWork one. iMac is Aluminum 20' with C2D 2.4 and ATi 2600 Pro.
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Dec 13, 2009
For a few days now, my 13" MBP (purchased in August; painfully clean-install upgraded to Snow Leopard in October) has been freezing into spinning wheel mode randomly every few minutes. It would seem that this happens particularly often in web browsers (but also when no browsers are operating and I'm typing away in Text Edit or chatting in Adium and Skype). When the browsers are on, the FlashPlayer would occasionally crash. No matter what app froze first, whatever else I click on also freezes.
The freezes happen most frequently after the computer has been to sleep and woken up by opening the lid. The wheels go spinning for up to two minutes, and then everything goes back to normal (for up to 3 mins before freezing again). The longer the comp operates after that, the rarer they become, and after a few hours they rarely happen at all (then again, some times they do anyway). On some occasions, everything freezes so badly I need to hard-reset, and then it takes the comp upwards of 15 minutes to reboot - and then everything keeps freezing, of course. Contrary to other reports of similar problems here, no CPU jumps appear to be happening during the freeze. I tried:
- Running Disk Utility after booting from Snow Leopard . Some permissions (which in forums here were referred to as inconsequential / not related to freezes) were repaired; HD in general "seems to be ok."
- Running RAM tests (with Rember, supposedly updated to Snow Leopard). Everything seemed fine
- Getting rid of the ARD agent (which was related to some of the permissions mentioned earlier)
- Stopping Bluetooth (as someone here with a similar problem thought it helped)
- Installing the Beta Adobe Flash Reader (same as above)
Nothing helped. I really don't want to take it to the lab; I live in Israel and the comp was purchased in the States, which means that the only licensed lab here reserves the right to keep the comp for up to 26 working days
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Nov 15, 2006
I am leaving for a week long trip and many parts of it will not be able to run the computer off of the powercord, which is a problem because I get about 40mins of wordprocessing use out of it when I run the battery alone. Can someone explain what the significance of these levels are for my Powerbook G4 15'' (Alm) 1.25GHz, namely the cycle count and full charge/remaining capacity?
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Jul 5, 2006
Well, the hdd in my powerbook has finally died. Won't be recognized in disk utility, and when it was, it wouldn't repair or even verify. I kept getting the invalid node structure error. My AppleCare subscription has also expired about 2 months ago.
So, I went online and found the following web site about opening up the Powerbook 15" (Aluminum) and how to go about replacing things in it:[URL]
Then, I went to tiger direct and found this hard drive to put in it:[URL]
What do you guys think? Is it really worth it?
What hard drive do you recommend I use?
Is this better than going and getting it done?
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Apr 8, 2010
I want to put my old 15" PowerBook hard drive into an external case. I pulled the hard drive out of the PowerBook. And I purchased a NexStar CS 2.5" SATA to USB 2.0 external case. But the connections don't match. What do I need to do? Do I need to buy some sort of adaptor? Hard drive is a Hitachi 120GB 5400RPM (model # HTS541612J9AT00) 2.5" Sorry, these photos are blurry as hell. Picture of hard drive pins:
Pins are in the following configuration (1's represent pins):...............
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Feb 20, 2009
I am having a constant laptop freeze issue with both Safari and Firefox. Laptop freeze occurs upon page load followed by most laptop functions being rendered unresponsive and a forced power reboot becomes necessary. In most cases, the cursor remains the only active item on the desktop and I am sometimes able to click on other open applications and bring them forward but that is the limit of their functionality. I can't force quit them via keyboard command either and the system clock is almost always frozen.
During the forced power reboot, the laptop does not seem to go through a permissions correction process (i.e., the long delay that you experience during gray apple screen start-up.) The reboot process is fairly quick and sometimes the only abnormality occasionally noted after reboot is that the desktop background has gone back to a default setting. Not sure if related but sometimes the iTunes library is damaged and has to be rebuilt if application was open prior to freeze. I've run complete diagnostics via Disk Utility, fsck, Applejack and TechTool Pro and no problems are noted.
OSX 10.4.11
1 Ghz PPC G4
1 MB L3 Cache
1 GB SDRAM
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Jun 20, 2014
My Powebook G4 12" (model A1010) during its start-up phase remains stuck on the "initial gray screen" without displaying the apple logo. However, I can access the system through the console provided by Open Firmware.
I would like to ask you what could be the problem and where such problem may reside (hard drives, memory, main board, etc).
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Oct 15, 2008
My 12 inch powerbook does not start up. Instead it loads to Darwin. I have an install disk from a 15 inch powerbook G4 and I would like to know if using this would work on my 12 inch powerbook G4?
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Oct 23, 2008
I recently bought a refurb iMac G5 with Os 10.4.11 - It has worked fine and now all of a sudden it will randomly go black as if hibernating and takes a few moments to come back on. It doesn't do it often, usually when I'm playing a video clip on the web for some reason, but not always.
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Dec 17, 2009
I've searched, but I haven't found any info on a situation like mine. I have a 2.5ghz Quad Core G5, it is outfitted with 4 gigs of ram and 2 500gb HD's. Everything was purchased in December of 2005. Over the last 8 months or I have been getting random Kernal Panics. Sometimes the machine will be sitting unused for hours and then I'll come back to it and it's locked up. Other times do not seem to have any pattern, it can be with multiple programs open, just safari, or FCP. The machine always starts right back up with no problems and typically continues to operate for hours or days before reoccurring.
I did the hardware check, and everything tested good. I switched to blutooth keyboard and mouse, and have disconnected all USB devices.I don't seen any signs of leakage.I am pretty much to the point that I assume the logicboard is bad. But I don't really know how to confirm this.
Being that the machine always starts back up and never has problems consistently I really don't know what to think. I wish it could be solved with replacing the ram and/or hard drives. But I just don't know how to determine the actual problem. All I have read is a lot of speculation.
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