Also, thanks to those generous friends who give away their old iBooks! A few months ago, I was given a iBook (PowerPC 3G-600Mhz, 640MB RAM, 20GB hard drive, OS X 10.3) and later purchased an identical used iBook that needed some repair work. Both iBooks required minor logic board repair, a new display inverter, and one had a cracked screen, that I replaced.

Once both machines were functional, I decided to install 10.4 on both. I performed clean installs and both with no issues. After a few software updates, both run rather well with 10.4.1 and are fairly fluid with 640 MB RAM. However, from time to time, during the boot process, both machines will hang during startup. At first the machines are completely unresponsive and get to where they both hang on a gray screen and become uncresponsive. It will happen 1 out of every 8-10 boot proceedures. Although this problem is isolated, it is incredibly frustrating when it occurs.

The machines will go through a similar process each time where they will not respond during power on, to taking at least 5 minutes to show any activity, to booting to a gray/blue screen and becoming unresponsive, to finally booting all the way to OS X. Getting to this point requires that I cycle the power on and off resorting to all of the various reset drills recommended by Apple and finally after 20-30 minutes of futile attemps, the iBooks return and run flawlessly. I can then reboot and the machines and have no sign of the problem (for a while anyway).

I realize the issue could be due to a flaky logic board, bad hard drive or data cable, heat, or possibly the software. I have diligently investigated and tested every hardware related possibility and cannot determine the cause. Both machines exhibit the same behavior and are essentially identical twins in terms of hardware and software. Downgrading to 10.3 did not solve the problem. In fact, the combo update to system update to 10.3.9 made both machines inoperable.

Incidentally, after doing some research I found Leopard 10.5 for Power PC available and read it will run on iBooks with a G3 processor. I may experiment with 10.5 soon.

Has anyone encountered this before with 10.4 running on iBook, PowerPC 3G-600Mhz, with 640 MB RAM? Please fill me in so that I can avoid more brain damage! Thank you in advance for any insight or suggestions!

I am trying to give life to an iBook 3g 800 Mhz/128 MB RAM/30 GB HHD. The hard drive died, so I installed a new, blank hard drive. Now with I hold the option key to go to the blue screen, it doesn’t show anything (Unlike before when I did it and it gave me the option of selecting the hard drive to boot. What am I missing? Do I need to disassemble the iBook again (a real pain too). I know that I will need more RAM as well. Do I need a MAC OS X disk too before I intsall Xubuntu 9.04? And can I download a disk for Mac from the PC computer? I know it’s been a year since you was hear but I really need some help. Thanks again.

Im looking to acquire a ibook for son to use garage band but maybe I dont want a system that old……hmmmmmm