Powerbook G4 15" won't boot ... sometimes

Hi,
My daughters friend needed to upgrade the hard drive on his 15" Powerbook G4. We installed a new WD WD2500BEVSRTL drive, and installed Leopard from scratch. All worked great until he took it home, and it started not wanting to boot consistently. When you press the power button, sometimes it will do nothing and sometimes you'll get the startup sound and then a black screen. If you unplug the power and battery and let it set for a few minutes, it will many times go ahead and boot. The only thing that is consistent is that it's not consistent. Another thing we noticed is that there is a several second delay between the startup sound and when the gray screen with the Apple logo appears (that is when it boots). The gray screen used to appear pretty quickly.
Any help would be appreciated!

try zapping the pram and reset the power manager.

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Quote from: Bernhard on 02-November-11, 23:59:59
>>Posting Guide<<
To answer that you will need to be more specific on the CPU and memory.
Gotya.
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Hi guys i just got myself a pismo (always wanted one) but it won't boot at all !!
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A dead PRAM battery can cause this. So disconnect the battery connector (it's under the kbd). This site has instructions. http://www.ifixit.com/Device/PowerBook_G3_Pismo If you get it booted, reconnect the battery. It's a rechargable battery so it may take a charge.
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 Cheers, Tom

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Quote
I can't update the BIOS because it hangs on making a backup.
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Joe

Maybe I should elaborate. I am using a PowerBook G3 Bronze keyboard, running 10.2 (Was at 10.3.9)
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Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
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Invalid B-tree Header
Invalid map node
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Checking multi-linked files.
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Missing thread record (id = 2127168)
Missing thread record (id = 2127257)
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Darwin/BSD (G3computer.local.) (console)
login:
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Message was edited by: Nyati585

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Moderator comment: Please don't post the same message(s) in multiple places as it splinters the discussion. Duplicate(s) removed.

Thanks for the suggestions, I managed to find out what was wrong:
There is a boot exclusion list in BIOS that I was not aware of, and USB flash drive was on here by default on my machine for some reason. If anybody else have USB boot issues, this is how I got it working:
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Hi t,
I believe eww is correct that it is not the sleep switch. As he mentioned earlier, you need to look closely at the bottom cover to see where something is coming in contact with it. Note: it may be that the short (as you have surmised, I'm quite sure that's what it is, the question is where it is) may be a conductor coming into contact with the bottom cover, OR it may be that the bottom cover is pushing something else up, causing a short in another area. The fact that you have to remove/install the logic board to get it to boot again after installing the bottom cover seems to suggest this latter possibility, that once something is forced out of place by the bottom cover, then it must be "dislodged." Tolerances in these PBs are very tight.
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MOVED: [ISSUE] GTX 970 gaming 4 PC won't boot [sometimes]

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Message was edited by: rick268 Also, I can boot into Open Firmware just fine.

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Allan Jones wrote:
I maintatined three Wallstreets for a friend for years. They stayed in regular service from new until he replaced them with MacBook Pros last summer!
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