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Let me first explain that I am completely Mac illiterate. I've never even seen a Mac boot up.
A college student brought me an iBook G4 that would not boot past a blue screen. The Mac guys I know said it was dead. Everything I can find on a Mac booting to a blue screen has failed to correct the problem, so I'm assuming it is dead. I'm hoping that it is dead due to a corrupt hard drive though. She has no CDs for this G4 either, so any kind of recovery is out the window.
I took the drive out and saved all of her important stuff off of it using a program called Transmac. Now what I'm trying to do, since she's a broke college student, is to install a version of Linux on it. I'm using an Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit CD just because I already had that CD burned and ready. However, I can't figure out how to get this aggravating iBook to boot from a CD. I've tried powering on with the Option key held down and that boots me to a blue screen with 3 icons on it: what looks like a circular refresh arrow on the left, a hard drive with a white circle and a blue X in it labeled Mac HD in the middle, and an arrow pointing to the right on the right. What does this screen tell me? Does the X by the drive mean it isn't seeing that as a usable drive? Is there supposed to be a CD drive showing on this screen too if I have a bootable CD in the drive?
I've also tried holding the C button and powering on but that doesn't boot to the Ubuntu 9.04 CD that I put in it either.
Any help would be appreciated. I posted another topic in the Linux OS forum to find out what might be the best distro of Linux to use in this situation. I know everyone has there preferences, but I need something that a computer illiterate 20 year old music major will be able to handle.
A college student brought me an iBook G4 that would not boot past a blue screen. The Mac guys I know said it was dead. Everything I can find on a Mac booting to a blue screen has failed to correct the problem, so I'm assuming it is dead. I'm hoping that it is dead due to a corrupt hard drive though. She has no CDs for this G4 either, so any kind of recovery is out the window.
I took the drive out and saved all of her important stuff off of it using a program called Transmac. Now what I'm trying to do, since she's a broke college student, is to install a version of Linux on it. I'm using an Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit CD just because I already had that CD burned and ready. However, I can't figure out how to get this aggravating iBook to boot from a CD. I've tried powering on with the Option key held down and that boots me to a blue screen with 3 icons on it: what looks like a circular refresh arrow on the left, a hard drive with a white circle and a blue X in it labeled Mac HD in the middle, and an arrow pointing to the right on the right. What does this screen tell me? Does the X by the drive mean it isn't seeing that as a usable drive? Is there supposed to be a CD drive showing on this screen too if I have a bootable CD in the drive?
I've also tried holding the C button and powering on but that doesn't boot to the Ubuntu 9.04 CD that I put in it either.
Any help would be appreciated. I posted another topic in the Linux OS forum to find out what might be the best distro of Linux to use in this situation. I know everyone has there preferences, but I need something that a computer illiterate 20 year old music major will be able to handle.
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