On Dec 18, 2008, at 3:45 PM, nestwasright wrote:

> Do you good folks think changing the cable for the hard drive would  
> get this working?

Seems unlikely to me.

My reasoning: The HD and the CD drive are on separate busses, so if  
the HD cable was bad, the CD drive should still boot normally, but  
evidently doesn't. Likewise, if neither the HD or CD would boot, an  
external Firewire drive still should boot.

I haven't seen any mention in your previous reports of trying the  
verbose startup with "Cmd-v" keys at startup? The fact that you can't  
boot into Target Disk mode using the "T" key at startup is a very bad  
sign. This could imply corrupted firmware, and since Apple never  
released any firmware updates for the 17" PowerBook G4 you are  
basically out-of-luck. This idea of corrupted firmware is not common  
or likely because the self-test that produces the chime will check-sum  
the firmware, so the corruption would have to be two bits both  
flipping within that same portion of the firmware so that the check- 
sum would remain valid, and this is VERY unlikely.

Are you sure it's not booting normally and the screen itself isn't the  
problem? Have you tried an external monitor? If you hear the HD going,  
and after a suitable amount of time for boot to complete you press the  
Power key followed by the Return key and it shuts down normally, this  
would imply that it's completing a normal boot process and your LCD or  
video card is bad.

Perhaps reassemble and take it to an Apple Genius Bar to see what they  
think?

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