Chosen Solution

My wife’s Powerbook has been having trouble. For a couple of starts it would suddenly go gray and she said it just died. She had to reboot. Now it is just the opening screen with the apple and nothing more. It just sits there. I am wondering if her hard drive is gone. We are out of town and have no discs to boot up with. Any suggestions great appreciated.

You’ll need another Mac. Hook up via a FireWire cable, start your machine up holding down the “T” key. Your hard drive icon should show up on the other Mac. You can now use Disk Utilities to repair it. You can also try starting up holding down the Shift key to try to start in Safe Mode.

Hi Doug, The standard drill for this sort of odd behavior is to back up your data then:

  1. Reset the power management system: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964
  2. Reset the PRAM/NVRAM: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379
  3. Boot into single user mode: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1492 4a) Run fsck (instructions will be above the prompt) if you don’t have AppleJack installed 4b) Run AppleJack If this doesn’t return your Powerbook back to normal operation, then I suspect you might have a hardware issue (battery or logic board) Hope this helps!