Geekboy(Wizard)'s Journal: She's dead Jim

I have a problem. My TiBook won't boot any more. Well, it mostly won't boot.

Here is where the problems began. I was at school, waiting for class to begin, and since I used my laptop on the train from work to school, my battery was decently low (10-20%). I decided to drain the battery all the way, and do a full recharge when I got home. I booted single user, mounted /tmp read-write, and started compiling random things (but not installing), to drain the battery. I killed it, buttoned up the laptop, and went to class. I got home, plugged her in, and went to sleep.

In the morning, I turned her on, so I could check my email and all of that, and it went (mostly fine). Then random bad things would happen. I would be in the middle of compiling something, and my machine would hard freeze. On boot, it would panic while detecting the hard drive. Not just regular panics, but it would freak out my screen as well (like half of the horizontal lines jumped up and to the right about 4 inches). Multi-line panic messages (when they should have been 1 line), hard freezes. Seemed to happen when I wrote to /usr. I did a dd scan (dd if=/dev/wd0c of=/dev/null) , and found 2 sequencial bad sectors. I powered her off, and ordered a new hard drive. That was the last time I could get her to boot properly.

A few weeks later the new hard drive came, so I called a friend who had the torx bits to open my TiBook, and we went to town on my lappie. Put in the new harddrive, pressed the powerbutton, and...........nothing. She ignored us. :( We pull the battery, and tried to boot just on mains. No dice.

My friend is an old time Mac user, and still is, so we try everything he can think of. Little reset button on the back, we worked that like a cheep...uhh.....dollar bill. We pull ram, and eventually get 2 boots out of it. Original RAM in the top slot, for the first one. And the other RAM in the top slot. (but neither combonation would happen again).

We were able to run the Apple Troubleshooting CD, both Extended and Basic tests, which claimed that all parts had either passed, or didn't exist (The only parts that didn't exist was the Airport, which I don't have). Curiously, in the "notes" section, it had the error code "POST/16/1".

I managed to find a site that listed some Apple boot errors, and 16 seems to hint at PMU (Power Management Unit), which seems logical, based on the evidence I have just presented.

The system is no longer under warrenty, as I bought it last December (1 year limited warrenty came with the system, and I did not spring for the extended warrenty)

*sigh* I guess it's time to take her into a professional, and get her repaired. Not looking forward to the costs on this one.