PowerBook G4 booting issues

[jreidsma]

Hi everyone,

Model A1095 PowerBook G4. Battery is mostly bad last that I knew of. 1GB ram. Last time I used this laptop it worked perfectly, it has been sitting in my room with the rest of the laptops.

The issue is that it will not boot most of the time. It has booted twice in the last few days. The rest of the times I attempt to turn it on no signs of life appear. The plug in glows like usual but nothing else.

I have tried resetting by unplugging, taking the battery out, plugging back in, holding power. One time it worked and booted while the other time it made a sort of beep sound and a light on the front of the laptop blinked with the beeping.

After the reset it went right back to being lifeless. I am unsure if the laptop is going dead or what, so figured I should post.

Edit: it seems to be about 1/3 of the boots are good now. 1 good boot to 2 lifeless attempts.

Thanks.

 

[ClassicHasClass]

Is there a pattern to the blinking? Sounds like it's failing power-on diagnostics.

 

[NeXT]

Unplug the pram battery. It causes general weirdness when it no longer wants to recharge.

 

[jreidsma]

Unplug the pram battery. It causes general weirdness when it no longer wants to recharge.

That fixed it, I just took the battery and its little board out. Now it boots up every time so far. Sooner or later I might get a replacement, but if the date and time is wrong it's not big deal.

Thanks! Glad to have it working again. Guess I should have figured it was he little battery, seems like those do weird things in Macs when they need replacing.

 

[Wildman]

Guess I should have figured it was he little battery, seems like those do weird things in Macs when they need replacing.

It seems like later model powerbook g4's are prone to odd behavior as they get older, I have two A1138's here that wont even power on at all unless there is at least a bit of charge on the main battery even if they're plugged in.