Every now and then at the hallowed office of ZeroXR 13mg, I do salvage projects. These things range from sterilizing computers with computer forensics tool kits to building full scale machines. This round… I wanted to do something charitable for my sister.

Alice has had a trustworthy iBook G4 that she’s had with her from entering college… Well, about a week ago… She’s reported it would get into a phase where the machine would be stuck on a white screen with a gray Apple logo and the spinning icon keeps going… No system boot-up at all. She is going to Florida to attend my cousin’s wedding and well… because she’s got no laptop… she won’t be able to sync and charge her iPod nano.

I felt bad and this evening… I took her iBook to my lab table. I tried resetting the PRAM and NV-RAM, resetting the PMU with no avail. My friend Tyler had suggested trying to boot from Single User Mode and to run the repair command… That worked… but on rebooting… same issue. I tried to reboot to safe mode and that failed. I tried a forced disk boot and the OS X Tiger disc reported the disk was ok… so I am at a loss…

I would hate to think it’s the logic board… but anyone else have possible ideas? Anything would be good… I’d like to help my sister out cause she’s got tons of valuable files on the machine to boot.