Chosen Solution
The device: 14" iBook G4 The immediate issue: As soon as the device starts to boot, it immediatedly powers off. Exactly what happens: I plug it in and hit the power button. The fan comes on, it makes a noise and in a few seconds a grey screen with the sproket (?) comes up.The screen goes black again for a few seconds.The screen turns blue, these is a mouse cursor and then the Apple OS X logo comes up with a loading bar.The bar loads for approximately 1-3 seconds (roughly the 2-5% though it does not display numbers) and then the whole system powers off abruptly. First startup: It did this once the first time I started it up, but has not done it since. The first time I powered up the computer something that looked like a Mac Command Line Interface ran for a few minutes. It was a black screen with lines of white text. I should have taken down exactly what it said, but didn’t. I remember it had ‘mDNS responder’ ‘will retry if fails in 60 seconds’ and it tried to run something several times, which failed repeatedly. After 3-4 fails, it stopped. When I hit enter it asked me for a login. Background: The device was given to me as not functioning by a friend. It had not been powered on in several years when I received it. He is notoriously quite rough on his possessions (it took me 20 minutes just to clean the grime off the outside of the device with alcohol and Q-tips). My friend is not a ’technology person’ so his information about what was actually wrong with it was a little spotty. He mentioned the hard drive ‘might’ be bad and that he was having issues with the power cord and/or DC in plug. I bought a brand new power adapter/cord for it but the laptop does not seem to want to power up sometimes unless I fiddle with the cord a little. It also feels loose. In short, I’m expecting to possibly replace the DC in board and harddrive with the tutorials I found here. Thanks in advance for any and all help. Please let me know if any additional information or pictures might help.
Sounds like he may have set a master password (which you don’t want to do). Try this: change the RAM configuration, take out one chip. Then boot the machine and zap the PRAM by holding down the p & R and option and command keys (apple). Hold till you hear it tone three times. Now see if it will boot. Did you get the original system installation disk?
