Chosen Solution

Heeeeelp! I know this is the wrong category but I couldn’t find anything closer. About 3 months ago, I got an old Ibook G4 model. I’m a lifelong Window’s user, so apple stuff is extremely foreign to me. My laptop only had like, 60 GB of space, so I went and tried clearing as much clutter as possible cause it always ran all choppy. I didn’t wanna mess anything on it up, so I also looked all over the internet for cleanup applications…which I couldn’t find any of. I didn’t bother buying disk or anything because I’m broke, and so is the drive for it. So now I’m just carefully picking out things to delete, and before I know it, I accidentally delete everything from off it. Here is what happens now: Boot the system > Music plays > apple logo appears > Not so nice screen with kernel panic error, and a box backing the dialog. Nope, I cant even access the computer now. I went through the trouble of even putting Windows 7 and Ubuntu on a flash drive. Buuuut, My Mac can’t even recognize it. There’s no way to actually tell since there are no light indicators, so I put something that would light up into both ports, and nothing happened. Yes, I even held down the keys to go to the command prompt, and typed in lines I found online. They either have no effect, or send me to an all grey screen with crossed out circle. I won this laptop and I just really don’t want it to go down on me… There has to be something I can do? I’d like to know:

  • How to enable my usb ports
  • How to recover from my mistake
  • Or how to get past the kernel panic screen And please do keep in mind that I have no access to anything past the Kernel Panic screen. Thank you all!

Your in a bit of a tight space here as the iBook needs the older OS-9 or early OS-X 10.5.8 (being the last that will work) as this system uses an IBM PowerPC processor vs what Apple uses today Intel. The system will require a FireWire external drive (no support for USB booting). And, it won’t run Windows natively! It will run Linux though. At this point you’ll need to find a friend with an older G4 based system to borrow their OS CD to boot up your system to re-install your OS. Or, if they have a FireWire external HD which is bootable install the OS from it.