What's wrong with my drive? Dead Drive? ATA controller? Logic Board?

Question

Hi!
I have had a problem with my iBook G4 1.33GHz for a while now. I've tried a few times to fix it and then have given up thinking replacement was the best option. I'll try to be brief but this saga has actually been going on for over 2 years.
The basic problem is that the computer finds the HD intermittently. The problem used to occur after the computer had booted and was on for maybe an hour. A friend of mine removed the drive and had it running in a separate enclosure for a few days. It seemed fine-all disk checkers like Disk Warrior checked it out just fine. He reinstalled the drive and gave me back the computer. Within a few days, it froze like before. Upon restart I just get the question mark folder.
That was almost 2 years ago. I've tried a few different things to see what was the problem but to no avail. Here's what I have tried:
-Booting into target disk mode-the disk does not mount.
-Booting from a CD-even if I hold down the C key, it prompts that this is going to be a new install and when I get to the screen to pick the volume, the HD does not appear.
-Tried the shim trick as indicated at:
http://coreyarnold.org/ibook/?p=20
Some earlier symptoms included video issues so this made sense.
-Took apart yesterday to make sure the drive connected well. It didn't work at first but later booted from hard drive.
-Since it booted, I restarted in Target Disk mode and ran Disk Utility from my iMac. There were some errors but DU was able to fix them all. Restarted iBook no problem.
-Ran Apple Hardware Test overnight in loop mode. After 18 rounds, nothing came up.
-Ran SMART Reporter and got green.
-Thought everything was ok so I ran Software Update. First round went fine. I ran it a second time knowing that some updates can be incremental. Upon downloading, computer froze and since then I am back to square one-no booting.
-Took apart today to see if there was any corrosion on the ATA chip as mentioned in this article:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2310290&tstart=0
as the thread mentioned a lot of stuff I was experiencing.
-Reassembled after finding nothing.
-Now the computer does not boot whatsoever-it tries to eject disk in optical drive and then nothing else-no sounds, no video, etc.
So what does all of this mean? I thought the earlier indicators were a dying drive but when my friend checked it out and found nothing, we were stumped. He actually suggested the ATA controller. The not wanting to boot from a CD really bothers me. What does that mean? I have never seen that in 20 years of using Macs.
Oh and if it matters, this computer was formerly fixed as it did have the dreaded logic board problem.
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
Brian

Answer 1

Hi again!
So this is with the new board? Was there sectoring of the lines?
If so that's the graphics chip most likely.
Yes. However, since this has gone on for a while and I never finished taking care of it, I can't remember all the details like sectoring of the lines.
The problem used to occur after the computer had booted and was on for maybe an hour.
So it freezes? That does sound like a GPU problem esp as it happens after an hour or so. (thermal flex causing separation of BGA)
Normally, yes. I have also gotten the kernel panic screen (You must restart your computer now). When it froze this morning, I had started to download a System Update. The clock ran, but I couldn't force-quit anything. What about the fact that the drive doesn't mount in Target Disk Mode?
You could pull the board and send it for reball.
I've also found a few boards on eBay that so far are less than the reball, but unless it was already reballed, then I run the risk of this happening again in the future, right?
Thanks again for your help!
Brian