My iBook Makes Me Want To Cry

Question

Here shall be told the story of one of my most frustrating experiences in my dealings with computers. I apologize for the length, but this has been a problem which has plagued me for some time and I’m hoping that the more detailed my account of the tale is, the better chance there is of someone recognizing a potential solution. Without further ado, I present:
My Computer Is Broken and It’s Making Me Sad:
The story of a boy who needs his iBook working.
So I bought an iBook G4 a little over three years ago for college and have had very few problems until this summer. Seemingly out of the blue, whenever I would reboot the computer I would get the Question Mark Folder, however if I would shut down the computer and then boot it up, it would boot fine. For some reason there was an issue with restarting. One day in July however, I was browsing the web using Firefox and I got a weird error message. Unfortunately I don’t recall what it was, but it shut down Firefox, would now allow it to open again, so I decided to reboot the computer. After that I was unable to boot, constantly getting the ? Folder regardless of whether I rebooted or did a “hard boot.” My warranty had expired so there was very little help I could seek professionally, so I did my best to research the issue. I learned a lot about single-user mode and fsck, however I was never able to do a scan because of an “invalid sibling link” error. I did not have my original disks with me, and wouldn’t get them back until I could get my stuff out of storage in August, so I couldn’t boot from them and run disk utility. With the fsck check not working, I decided to set the laptop aside for a while and worry about fixing it later (I still had my desktop computer for use at home).
Last month, I had some more free time and decided I wanted to get the computer working. Assuming the hard drive was dead, I ordered a new 120GB hard drive (to replace the original 60GB). I got the new hard drive, installed OS X 10.4 with no issues, booted for the first time, ran Updates, was forced to restart because of the updates, and got the Question Mark Folder. I had assumed that the new hard drive would solve all my issues, but obviously that wasn’t the case. Having put nothing on the hard drive, I reinstalled OS X again, decided not to install any updates, tried to reboot the computer and went to a Question Mark Folder. I was stumped.
I decided to see what would happen if I put my old hard drive back into the system. I did more research and learned about fsck_hfs to do a rebuild, and when I did that on the old hard drive, it booted fine and allowed me to boot and reboot the computer. I thought if I could get the old hard drive working, I should be able to work out the issues on the new one as well (which I really wanted in the laptop as it was double the space).
With the new hard drive back in the system, I figured out that I can not reboot the machine (because I get the Question Mark Folder) but I can shut down the computer and do a “hard boot.” Based on advice I reset the PMU and ensured the Hard Drive was the startup disk, restarting still gives the ? Folder. I then tried running Disk Utility from my OS X install disk, I verified the hdd and everything was fine. Then I ran the disk permissions repair, and that was completed successfully. I ran verify disk one more time for good measure and then I got the “Invalid B-tree node size, Volume Check Failed” message. I ran two verifications about two minutes apart, the first one went fine, the second one failed.
With a few hard boots I was able to get back into OS X, ran disk utility inside OS X with no errors, rebooted into single user mode and forced an fsck with no errors. I gave the reboot command and got the ? Folder. I held the power button to shut off the system, pushed it again to start it up and the system booted fine.
Once inside I ran “Rember” to test the memory, and also rebooted to run the Apple Hardware Test, with no errors reported. I ran DiskWarrior which found no errors either. I’m not sure if this is random or not, but I’ve discovered that one of the best ways to ensure the system boots is to make sure the battery is removed and that the system is unplugged, so there is no power running to the system. Then by plugging in the system and booting up, it seems to work more often than not. I figured if removing all power ensures booting, perhaps there is an issue with the memory which is reset when the power is removed? These problems are past my area of knowledge now and this problem is so frustrating.
As I said, I’m a college student, so the loss of a laptop right now during the school year is a pretty big problem. I’m also getting ready to do a bit of traveling and not having a working laptop would be problematic. I’ve exhausted almost all my options as far as what I’m limited to based on my knowledge and research but I’m not ready to give up yet. Right now it seems my only option might be to try to use the old hard drive, and perhaps send the new one back. I know there is a chance the new hard drive is shot, but it just seems like an unlikely scenario to me. I think that’s pretty much the whole story, hopefully there’s a happy ending yet to be written. If anyone can offer anything, I would greatly appreciate it.
Sincerely,
me

Answer 1

Hi,
Welcome to the Discussions.
This thread, Could it be the Logic Board?, is about the same problem. You may want to try the drive in an external firewire enclosure.
John