My daughter has an Apple IBook G4. she has recently had problems getting it to open. when she turns it on, it warms up to the MacOSX screen then gives her a message that she neds to restart. HOd the power button or push the restart key. She said that the screen will sometimes go to a macfinder folder with a face and a question mark on it.

someone on Apple support told her that it's a kernal panic? Then they told her she would either have to pay the $50 fee to talk to tech support and see if they could fix it.

She has completely reinstalled the operating system already but still gets the same message. She said hte only software on it now is what came on it to begin with.

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Deb

Hi,

The kernel panic the ibook G4 is suffering from looks very much like a hardware issue, rather than anything your daughter has done to the mac. From my experience, a kernel panic that develops over and over again is either a memory fault or open firmware.

Check the open firmware first as this is eas to do:

Boot the mac, holding down command-option-o-f.

The mac will grey screen and come up with a command line interface.

Type in reset-nvram then hit return
Then type: reset-all and hit return again. The mac will automatically reboot.

If that does not work, I would suggest that it's a memory fault causing the kernel panic. I've seen this a lot where a memory stick has become dis-lodged and needs re-seating. Strange though as it would prevent you from even starting to install mac OS 10.4, which is very stringent about memory.

Rgds

Richard

***Mod edit - Ad link removed from post*** rigel

Richard-

It does appear to be a hardware problem and she is having to return it to Apple for repair. Fortunately, it is still under warrenty.

Thanks so much for your help though. I hate to send something off when it's something you can fix yourself!

Deb

Hi,

I bought an iBook G4 from ebay. It's my first apple so when it repeatedly reported "You must restart your computer" usually prior to the login screen although sometimes it went past the login and stayed workin for about five minutes before it happened. I thought I'd bought a duff one and wasn't impressed. After several hours of searching the web and trying various solutions (including following a video on youtube about taking it apart and placing a piece of paper over one of the components - which in this instance didn't help). I eventually came across a post [can't remember where] which said that you could find out what had caused the panic by looking at the panic log, this should be found at /library/logs/panic.log.

After rebooting several times to get far enough before a panic occured to read the log I finally managed it. In the log I found that every panic entry that had been reported contained details relating to AirPort. Other post on the web also mentioned that the Airport card is sometimes know to cause panic problems. I disabled AirPort by clicking on the Airport icon at the top of the screen and the problem did not occur. The upside is the problem has now gone completely, the downside is that I had to buy a USB wireless adapter but it only cost £10.

I would definately suggest looking in the panic log before doing anything else. At least if the Airport card is causing the problem this is a pretty cheap way of sorting it out.


PS. We accidently switched on the Airport a week later and the panics happened almost immediately and continuously . Needless to say it got switched off for good after that.

Regards,
Lee

Here's a troubleshooting article on Resolving Kernel Panics that might come in helpful for somebody searching about this topic.

@Lee,
I've read somewhere that an Airport card can be easily re-seated on certain model Macs. Look in ifixit.com pictorials to see if the Airport card on your model Mac is easily accessible so you can re-seat it.