TiBook G4 400 - Continuous Freezing

Question

Hi Everyone,
I recently acquired a 2nd hand G4 400 TiBook, I have found that it has a freeze problem, when I first got it I did a fresh install of tiger, all seemed fine, the reboots began to fail, now I find that I cannot get to the desktop at all, so I put the install disk in again, now I cannot complete the install process!!!!!!!!!!
some times it stalls on the initial apple logo with spinning wheel, the wheel just stops spinning
sometimes it gets to the blue choose a language screen, but pointer is frozen.
sometimes it gets to beginning a fresh install but freezes during the installation.
I have read many posts, lots of people say about the crimped ribbon from the trackpad, I will check this but it can freeze without me touching anything from switching it on. I have seen additional posts pointing to faulty PMU boards and some saying it is the logic board. Can anybody please provide a list of which order I can check these things. obviously I can do the insulated ribbon myself, but I dont want to have to pay out on major parts unless I can be sure it will solve the issue.
thanks for listening to my rambling and thanks for any assistance in advance.

Answer 1

Hi, TR. Until you can boot reliably to a CD or DVD, you won't be able to tell whether anything you've tried has been successful. So getting to the point where you can start up from an installer disc or third-party utility CD should be your first goal.
The orange ribbon cable issue doesn't affect the 400MHz and 500MHz Tibooks; their trackpad cable is routed differently from those in the three later generations of Tibooks.
Tiger requires a minimum of 256MB of installed RAM. If your Tibook doesn't meet that requirement — and it may not, since that's more than was standard in a base 400MHz unit — I wouldn't expect it to boot into Tiger, either from its hard drive or from a Tiger installer DVD. Do you have an older, less demanding bootable CD or DVD you could start up from? If so, try that.
One other thing you might try without spending any money:
Take the bottom cover off the Tibook and gently disconnect the hard drive connector from the logic board. Turn the PB right side up, prop it up on blocks so it's safely supported, and try to start it up from a suitable CD or DVD with the hard drive disconnected. A failing hard drive can prevent a Tibook from starting up, but if that's the only obstacle, the PB should start if the defective or damaged hard drive is disconnected or removed.
If there are two RAM modules installed, and you have a CD or DVD that should be able to boot with just one in place (like an OS 9.1 or 9.2.1 retail installer CD), remove one of the RAM modules and try booting with just one installed. If that works, remove that module and put the other in its place, and run the test again. Then try each module (one at a time) in the other RAM slot. This may tell you whether one of your modules or one of your slots has gone bad.
Beyond these experiments, there isn't much you can do to troubleshoot a complete failure to boot to any source volume. You need the computer to talk to you about what's going wrong — and right now, obviously, it isn't talking at all.