Mac Forum / General / Hardware / February 2006

dear mac users,

i was recently working happily away on my 3 year old ibook G3 when the
screen suddenly turned into a bunch of lines, as if the video card was
on the fritz.

it corrected itself a moment later, and then the screen went completely

grey and stayed that way.  i rebooted, and it booted up fine, until
about 3 minutes later it all went grey again.

since then i mostly just hear the start-up chime, then the screen stays

black.  the optical mouse doesn't get power at this point.  the hard
drive doesn't spin.  i have to force the power off and keep trying.

this has been 2 days now, and it's booted up once and i burned a cd to
back up some files. it booted the one time after i had reset the power
management scheme. after i burned my cd, i shut it down normally, let
it sit for about 8 hours and tried booting up again.  back to the chime

and black screen.  at this point it doesn't boot from a cd, or into
safe mode or anything.  i can't zap the PRAM after the chime.  nothing
happens.  no more extra chimes...

today i tried again, mostly getting the same thing, but it did boot up
once.  i tried to do another back-up cd, but then all of the lines came

on the screen, flashed off briefly and the screen went grey again and
everything froze.

it seems like a software prob, but i'm not sure where to start.  i
don't have the boot discs for tiger 10.4  i don't want to lose
everything on my computer.

any ideas?

thanks,
karen

ps
i have not installed anything new recently.  i've just been working in
illustrator and flash mx.