iBook display problems?


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Hello

I currently own a G3 iBook (dual usb, snow) of the lastest models they produced before switching to the G4 ones.

I bought it last summer. This morning I took the iBook from my courrier bag, did a wee bit of Terminal Services stuff over a VPN for one of the companies I work for on my 802.11b network. I then went to do some geek shopping (got some new ballpoints, they're very... flashy.). During the bus ride, I opened the lid on my iBook to do some wardriving -- the screen turned on, flickered then went black. I did not see the sleep light glimmering, so I assumed my laptop was out of batteries, since I had left the battery drain yesterday while charging my iPod. So I wait until I get back to one of my friend's house. I plug the thing in (Mainly in order to recharge my iPod) and notice the thing won't turn on. I hear the disk grinding though. So I shut down by holding the power button, restart try again.

After 10 tries, I finally take out every detachable device (including the battery) from my iBook which boots. YAY i say.

But instead of the apple logo, I get a white screen, and no console output, to my great despair. And then my heart skipped a beat. The screen was covered in blue and red garbage, altering from the apple logo, to the console, to what looked like my screen MELTING or being pushed in. (nice hippy trippy colors ranging from blue to red while trying purple.) After some rebooting, light screen tapping, and a few loud french invectives, I press power and bam, Apple logo. The console output pops in, telling about deeply interesting things such as my firewire GID being local and enabled, and that it's proceeding to run a wee bit of fsck_hfs. I wait. But counting orphaned inodes does not take that long usually. I put my hear to the disk. No grinding. I let out a worried swear in order to vent out the pressure, then I notice the fonts are flickering. Reboot. Screen turns black. Lather rinse repeat, until satan heard my plea and agrees to boot my iBook completely, to single user mode for the price of my soul and the promise of me building him a 65 nodes Bewulf cluster when I get there for smoking way too much.

The second I touch the screen, bam, the blue garbage comes back and the thing freezes.

Now it will display something useful once every 15 tries or so. (Average, of course.)

My instinct tells me the video cable that goes into the hinge is in advanced stages of decomposition and needs to be replaced, but a little voice in the back of my head keeps telling me something among the lines of "Why the hell would the whole thing freeze then?" and I somehow think the whole logic board is failing. Reading around on google leads the infamous "Logic board failure petition and stuff " which was unheard of by me up to this point.

I am still under applecare warranty (basic) but I am worried about the following things when I think of sending my precious iBook to the evil Apple Hardware Tech Monkeys

1) I have neat-o-matic stickers on my iBook I got from hackerstickers.com. I do not wish to loose them.

2) I have valuable data on that ibook. My main workstation hard disk died and I lost all my data, some of it was still on my laptop and I do not, I really do not want to loose the stuff on it, as it's the last place where it's available.

3) I need my lappy for my work, and cannot afford to spend too much time without it...

So i'm asking you neowinians the following questions:

-Can you think of anything that would bring my iBook back to life? I am not afraid of opening it up.

-Is my "logic board" assumption right?

-How is applecare service? Will they just give me another one (and get rid of my wonderful stickers) or just replace my defunct hardware? Also will I loose data?

I am really ****ed. The second I fix something among my computers, something else breaks.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, I also cleared the nvram using OpenFirmware at some point. My volume was to mute, now is back to default -- now hear the "Pweeeeeeeeing" chime when pressing the power key.

Edited by mr_da3m0n
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Laptops are hard to do any kind of work on and with a problem like this even on a desktop system that'd be hard to deal with. See if theres an apple store in the vicinity and talk to them about it, if not you can always call one. I'd try to isolate the problem more first...that whole thing where it froze is just freaky, I think maybe when you made that deal with the devil he snuck into your laptop or something :s cuz thats just crazy.

What happens if you connect it to an external monitor?

1. Your laptops wellbeing is ALOT more important that any stickers no matter how cool

2. Do you know anyone that has one of those one-button backup harddrive things? Data loss is not cool so if you do send it back make sure you make it VERY CLEAR that you want that harddrive and everything on it...if you're not afraid of doing a little surgery I'd say remove the harddrive, get an adapter to hook it up to a desktop and copy all your stuff...that'd also let you scan the drive and make sure its healthy.

3. You might be out of luck there...repairs and stuff usually take at least 2 weeks :(

Good luck...its a ****ty situation and i'm glad i'm not in your shoes ;) but hopefully things will work out

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In order to better demonstrate what happens, I did a little video. It's very creepy if you are lighthearthed.

I will encode it in a few seconds and post it...

:D

Dude that sucks! Certainly seems more than JUST a display problem - afterall, if it were the DISPLAY, it'd still output via VGA to your CRT. In light of the recent Logic board quirks and such, i think its pretty safe to say its something along those lines.

Seems you better get into contact with Apple. I recall some-one saying that can protect your data on your HDD - but I think you have to pay some fee for them to do so. As for your stickers, *shrug* i dunno man, i'd assume they'll be fine, altho IMO you need a slap for fuglyfying your iBook! (LOL - is that a word?!)

Oh, and that strange screen thing @ the end of the vid... Anyway you could make a screensaver out of it, would be AWESOME!!! :happy: :laugh: :)

Good luck with it buddy.

Edited by ~~NeYo~~
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This exact problem happened to my iBook back in the summer. After about a week or two of this going on the monitor wouldn't come back on. Called Apple and had to send it in for a new logic board. My advice is start backing up your data.

All they did to mine was replace the board. All my data was still on my hdd along with all the scratches on the lid.

Good luck,

MOR

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I've read a lot of stuff about the screen problems that are plaguing various iBooks right now. It seems to be a rather common thing, all in all.

Reading about it, it seems that people who have had the problem, and took the time to look into it on their own, is that when the laptop runs for any length of time, and heats up inside, the soldering on the graphics chip (IIRC, the problem only /really/ started appearing with iBooks when they switched to the Radeon chipset,) gets weak - allowing the graphics chip to actually -shift- inside it's socket - causing various display glitches, problems, and loss of screen.

Apple's solution, of course, is to replace the logic board. But, if your read about this online, the problem can come right back.

If you're at all technologically/electronically savvy - there's a "rubberband" fix you can look up online - that people use to keep their graphics chips from shifting about on them when the system heats up. From everything I've read, this works beautifully.

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I will google it but if you have a link that would be great. Did it say anything about this being more prominent for people who had hacked their firmware making their iBook display span?

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Did it say anything about this being more prominent for people who had hacked their firmware making their iBook display span?

I plead guilty of doing so c.c;

The things could be related...

Oh, and that strange screen thing @ the end of the vid... Anyway you could make a screensaver out of it, would be AWESOME!!!

I was thinking the same thing actually :p

And as for the stickers well, I like them because they make me look more like a hacker (in the unix sense) than some art freak.

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I will google it but if you have a link that would be great. Did it say anything about this being more prominent for people who had hacked their firmware making their iBook display span?

Hrm - let me check my bookmarks. There's been links and discussions to all kinds of fixes to iBook video problems...

Here's one: http://members.rogers.com/btraynor/

Sounds like your problem, since you mentioned the symptoms: Black screen. White screen. All sorts of colours on the screen. It's not a How-to or a step of instructions - but he does detail what he did that fixed /his/ problem.

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Okay well, great news. I was able to get the display back (at least temporarly) on my iBook. by "resocketing" the graphic chip.

I basically looked at plans of the motherboard I found on the net, and estimated where the graphic chip was. It seems to be a few centimeters to the left of the touch pad.

So I grabbed the iBook between my hands like a sandwich and pressed relatively hard on that point.

Next boot, hello iBook display.

I moved the screen lid around on its axis to ensure everything was trouble free, and the display did not flicker. I will now proceed to backup my stuff while I still can ;)

I will use it for a few hours and update the status...

So for now, everything is back to normal.

I would like to take this moment to say:

iBook owners, I can't stress this enough. Never grab your iBook using only the lower left corner. It seems to bend the case and move the chip around, producing defects like these.

Now, time for food. Thank you for that very useful link, xRKx.

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  • 2 weeks later...

yeah, the moment i started reading this i know it was a video card issue instantly, the freezinf is from the Mac OS X display drivers not loading correctly, so in a sense all you need is a new video card, not a logic board. But since it was soldered they have to replace the whole thing. *tisk tisk* :angry: usually when Mac OS X freezes at startup is from some kind of hardware failure resulting in a driver fighting situation, this happened when i installed a new harddrive into my G4 powermac, i couldnt get it to start up. my solution was to remove teh harddrive... and it worked fine. im gonna have a professional install it for me so it would actually work... i dont know what was wrong with my harddrive thou :huh: .

Rock On, -YsK

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Actually it WAS the video chip (which is soldered onto the logic board, hence part of the whole thing) that de-solders itself when heating, and "shifts" around, therefore corrupting video. Nothing to do with drivers ;)

Interestingly enough, I peeked into my iBook and it seems they now surround the video chip with a plastic frame, supposedly in order to prevent that problem. I am living proof that it does jack squat.

Now I have another problem, my iBook hard drive died, right when I was firing up my FTP client in order to do a backup.

Darn. I can kiss whatever was left of my data goodbye...

Well, time to send to apple, I guess. I wish there was a faster way to go...

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Actually it WAS the video chip (which is soldered onto the logic board, hence part of the whole thing) that de-solders itself when heating, and "shifts" around, therefore corrupting video. Nothing to do with drivers ;)

Interestingly enough, I peeked into my iBook and it seems they now surround the video chip with a plastic frame, supposedly in order to prevent that problem. I am living proof that it does jack squat.

Now I have another problem, my iBook hard drive died, right when I was firing up my FTP client in order to do a backup.

Darn. I can kiss whatever was left of my data goodbye...

Well, time to send to apple, I guess. I wish there was a faster way to go...

No, im talking about when your OS crashed, and when Mac OS X froxe on startup, it was becouse the video card drives found a problem with the Video Card and could no longer operate correctly, kind of like a hardware test...

but now your HD died... I feel bad for you...

Rock On, -YsK

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No, im talking about when your OS crashed, and when Mac OS X froxe on startup, it was becouse the video card drives found a problem with the Video Card and could no longer operate correctly, kind of like a hardware test...

Nah, I assure you, look closer. The screen shimmers. I also tried booting in single user mode/verbose mode, it just froze, no error. And only the display froze. I could still type "reboot" in background and watch my drive grind.

But yeah, the HD is kind of.... a bummer.

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Nah, I assure you, look closer. The screen shimmers. I also tried booting in single user mode/verbose mode, it just froze, no error. And only the display froze. I could still type "reboot" in background and watch my drive grind.

But yeah, the HD is kind of.... a bummer.

oh, you DIDNT say only the SCREEN froze, I thougt the whole operating system of the darwin thing crashed.... please dont confuse me lol. *mental rape*

Rock On, -YsK

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Well it actually depends on what state the operating system on. A text console will survive. Quartz will die and take down every single process with it.

Applying pressure to the bottom left quadrant of the board brought video back temporarily. The rubber band fix would have easily fixed it.

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