Trusty PowerBook G4 17" 1.33 GHz no longer playing the game after Leopard

Hi Guys and Girls
I sincerely hope you can help me.
Only a couple days after installing Leopard onto my PB it has, for some reason, become severely crippled. Luckily, I had been using TM so still have access tho everything I need but what is really bugging me is the waste that disposing of this machine would be.
I have tried everything.
It started with a Kernel Panic and went downhill from there. No I have the following erratic behaviour. Most of the time in attempting to booth the PB I hear the drives pin up and I get teh startup chime but the screen stays black. I have to hold the power button and listen very carefully to hear the drives spin down to know that I have switched it off. Occasionally it will boot into open firmware, but less frequently now. The OF stated that there had been an illegal instruction and then listed a string of characters (haven't managed to write it down (doh!) before typing mac-boot as it instructs me to do! It then, in response to 'mac-boot' will try to boot and I am back to the black screen. Then out of the blue it will star up normally then kernel panic either before the desktop loads or at seemingly random points.
I have swapped out the hard drive for a known working one and it did boot once but then failed to do it again. I have also after many unsuccessful attempts managed to boot into the Apple Hardware Test that came with the machine. I have run this with both memory modules installed and then individually (with much finger crossing between restarts) and I have repeated the extensive test over and over and over again and everything passes with flying colours!
What else can I do? How to you guys think I should test further?
I do have some thoughts on the matter…
If the PRAM battery was exhausted would this cause problems like this? I've had PRAM batteries fail before but it has never caused such chaos so I doubt if it is this!
Could it be a dodgy SuperDrive in which case can I just disconnect the cable and see if it will boot from the HDD or will the cable being disconnected stop it from booting anyway by way of a startup tests?
Has anyone else experienced anything quite like this? It is confusing me because the machine is giving so many different behaviours!
I hope I can save this machine because even at 4 years old it is a terrible waste of stuff when it worked perfectly well right up until the end! Not to mention the environmental impact!
And lastly, could Leopard have stressed the machine so much as to cause it to give up or is it just a coincidence?
Any advice or input would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.

Hi, Snakedoc. Remove the new RAM, reinsert your original RAM, and test again. If all goes well with the old modules, return the RAM you bought for a refund and order RAM from a reputable Mac-savvy vendor after confirming that it is guaranteed to work in your Powerbook. Crucial, Samsung, and Kingston RAM (but not Kingston's "Value RAM" line) are safe bets.
If you pick the right RAM for your PB model using the RAM selector on Crucial's website, it's guaranteed to work, no questions asked. Powerbooks are fussy about RAM, and there's a lot of it out there that just isn't reliable in them. You seem to have discovered some of it.
Message was edited by: eww

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Either the 1.5 Ghz of this model: http://www.apple-history.com/?page=gallery&model=pg4_family&performa=off&sort=da te&order=ASC
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http://www.macmaps.com/selling.html
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https://support.apple.com/ibook_powerbook/batteryexchange/
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http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n30612
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It will not boot unless I have a battery inserted.
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But if I do a full shutdown, then I am not able to reboot.
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Steffen Reichel wrote:
Hello Greg, hello Jim,
I was a week on autumn vacations, so I had plenty of time. I was trying to do.
I reboot from the original Tiger DVD, used Disk Utility from the install DVD and overwrote the harddisk 7 Times with zero. I did no partitioning, but renamed the disk and start setup.
Setup runs, as ever, with now failure. Reboot, and the system hangs....
I tried Apples Hardware Test, but the test cannot repair the harddisk, because of a failure message poping up, that a subsystem process cannot be executed, and the repair failed.
So I do not realy think, that the harddisk has an error, it seems different, because on a harddisk error, a format with zero would not perform that well, as the installation would not run that smooth...
I have done now serveral installtions tries, but all end up with the blue progress bar in the Mac OS X screen hanging at about a quarter of lenght and doing nothing further.... even if I wait for more than 12 hours...
I never have seen such a thing before.
Hello Steffen.
I do not really see a question in your new info, but, based on the totality of both your posts, my two guesses are as follows:
(1) This disk drive is either faulty or connected improperly. Alternatively, it seems possible to me that it is an incompatible drive that has been installed in this Mac.
If I could not find a way to tell whether one of these conditions exist, I would test by replacing this drive with a known working drive that is known to be compatible with the PowerBook.
If I did not have access to a working, compatible drive, I would ask an Apple Service Technician to fix the problem.
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I would test this by installing the problem hard drive in a different PowerBook 17" 1GB 1,6 GHz G4, to see if it works there. If so, you know the problem is with the PB rather than the drive itself.
If the problem is with the PowerBook hardware, unless I could troubleshoot and repair the problem, I would ask an Apple Service Technician for an estimate of the cost to correct the problem before undertaking repairs. It is possible that this will be a costly fix.
(3) Please let us know what happens. We will watch for your status update.
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Trusty PowerBook G4 17" 1.33 GHz no longer playing the game after Leopard

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