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A possible fix for a non-booting G3 PowerBook System
I've had a G3 Lombard collecting dust for the last couple of years in a closet because of it's failure to boot. Pressing the power button would spin up the hard drive and light the green led for about 2 seconds and then power down.

I've read countless posts about resetting the PRAM and replacing the battery, none of which worked. Disgusted and ready to chuck it I tried powering it up one more time and to my surprise it booted fine -- I had left the keyboard unplugged from the motherboard! Any attempt to reconnect the keyboard and boot resulted in the failure to boot. However, I have an external USB keyboard plugged in as I type this, and all is working fine!

Hope this helps somebody out there...
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A possible fix for a non-booting G3 PowerBook | 2 comments | Create New Account
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A possible fix for a non-booting G3 PowerBook
Authored by: macosx4me on Dec 15, '05 07:36:27AM

I'm sorry, but I don't see how this has any place in a forum about OS X.

As an Apple-certified tech of many years, I can say that yes, on that model powerbook, it can certainly happen that a faulty keyboard can keep it from booting.

Standard computer hardware troubleshooting is to pare down to the base hardware. Disconnect all peripherals. Disconnect native hardware: keyboard, modem, optical drive, hard drive (yes. Does it boot with a chime with HD disconnected ?), ram (does it boot and get to POST and indicate that no RAM is found)?

And on and on it goes.

Glad you got your old clunker working again, will be fine for word-processing :)



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A possible fix for a non-booting G3 PowerBook
Authored by: Little Neddy on Dec 15, '05 12:59:06PM

I appreciate snippets like this even though they are non-X.

I am in a similar situation, and now have another thing to throw at this G3 that doesn't want to start.

It is *still* a great machine and still does most OSX things, albeit slowly, that I need to do on the road



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