Volume control(s) will not work on my I Book please help !

Question

* INFO: White 2003 G4 I Book PowerPC 1.07GHz 256 MB Safari 3.2.1 133MHZ
!!! PLEASE HELP ME !!!
I'm going nuts here...
This morning everything on my old 2003 white I Book was great. It was operating VERY fast and fine.
I turned on my computer this morning, everything worked great, and I was reading things on the Net just fine.
I then saw there was a "Software Update", two of them actually, they were a "Security Update", and also a "Java For Mac 10.4 Release 8".
I downloaded both of them successfully through the Software Update feature.
After doing that I restarted my computer, and everything seemed okay.
But now the audio on my computer is gone, or messed up somehow. NO it is NOT on mute. The volume says it is on full blast, but there is no volume at all.I played YouTube videos, I tried a regular physical audio CD, I tried radio from the internet, all no sound. I tried disconnecting my speakers, I tried a full restart, I "verified preferences" and "repaired preferences", and I also put in my Tiger original disc and booted from that and ran "First Aid"... none of these have worked.
When you click the little volume button(s) up/down from the keyboard it simply shows all volume bars to the full "all the way loud position", and a circle with the diagonal line through it just underneath that.
I looked around in System Preferences in "Sound" and saw nothing wrong there from what I could tell.
I have no idea what to do and am very frustrated and do NOT want to have to redo my whole computer from the very beginning again with the Tiger disc, I have already done that 3 times in the last two years.I know this must have something to do with the Software Updates I did this morning.
Anyone ?

Answer 1

Boot from the installer disk, select language if applicable, choose utilities, run Disk Utility and verify (and repair if necessary) the drive. You can verify a drive from DU on your main drive while booted but I have found this can result in incorrect reporting of errors. To repair your drive you have to run it from a drive other than the boot drive anyway.
Next, boot from your drive in [Safe Mode|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107393] and repair permissions. You can repair permissions while booted from the installer disc but this uses the permissions configuration on the installer disc which may be out of date if you have run any updates on your computer. Booting your computer to Safe Mode restricts the number of things running on your computer while permissions are being run and done a bit of spring cleaning at the same time.
[Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214]
[Using Disk Utility in Mac OS X 10.4.3 or later|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302672]
[Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions|http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25751]
From BDaqua (couldn't have said it better):
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Install disc that came with your computer (Edit: Do not use this disc if it is not the same general version as what you have currently on your computer, e.g. use a Tiger disc for a Tiger drive, not a Panther disc), then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Click the disclosure triangle to the left of the hard drive icon to display the names of your hard disk volumes and partitions.
5. Select your Mac OS X volume.
6. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk.
Then Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions, reboot when it completes."
Many of us do not let Software Update do updates. We download them from Apple and install them one by one, verifying the drive and repairing permissions before and after with Disk Utility, testing between each update. And, of course, backing up the drive completely before hand should something go wrong. We can then restore in a matter of minutes.