G4 ibook motherboard fault.

Apparently there is a problem with some G4 ibooks. It can appear after a year or so in some machines. After being on for a few minutes, they get a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes. This article describes the problem and how to fix it.

What models are afffected?

You might be wondering if your ibook is affected. Here is my guess, if your ibook has built in airport extreme, (which is the case for all ibooks after October 19, 2004) you should be OK!

The original 2003 ibook G4’s (800/933/1Ghz) have the fault. This is the model I have. The “Early 2004″ (1Ghz) models up until Oct 2004 probably have the same motherboard.

The good news, the 60G (1.2Ghz) “Early 2004″ model and all the “Late 2004″ model ibooks (1.2Ghz/1.33Ghz) and Mid 2005 (1.33 and 1.42Ghz) have built in airport extreme, which means a different motherboard.
SUMMARY: Suspected models are M9164LL/A M9388LL/A M9165LL/A M9426LL/A M9418LL/A

IT APPEARS FROM THE COMMENTS THAT THE ABOVE INFORMATION IS WRONG. It appears even models with the new motherboards are affected.

I have started a survey here click to see it of the affected models.

What is the fault?

The Danish Consumer Complaints Board did some investigations and confirmed the fault. There is a really good report in the form of a pdf document with close up pictures of the fault here:

www.forbrug.dk/fileadmin/Filer/PDF/ENGF959-orig.pdf

Here is a photo from the paper. You can see the thin black line below the lead which is a crack in the solder.

My ibook is indeed just as the article describes it. The little chip gets hot, and if I press my finger on the chip, it works! Take my finger off, it stops working!
I rang Apple Australia and they don’t acknowledge that the problem exists. They have officially ‘never heard of it’.

The repair:

You need to grab a fine tipped soldering iron and heat up the top few pins of the chip one by one to resolder it to the logic board. Press the chip down while you apply a very clean and fine soldering iron tip to each pin.

This is a very complicated ‘how to’ a bit outside the scope of this site but may be interesting to some. Don’t attempt this one unless you have had lots of soldering experience!
Here are some pictures:

The G4 ibook with the bottom case off. The offending chip is circled.

Here is a closeup of where I have soldered the legs of the chip. You can see the base of the top pins are shinier from the new soldering. I soldered the top 3 or 4 pins on each side, but it’s only the top 2 pins that the fault occurs with as they are the main power pins. I applied a little more solder to the joint as well, that’s why it looks a bit lumpy.
Here’s an alternate crude DIY repair method:

http://johnbakersblog.co.uk/design-fault-in-apples-ibook-g4/

another DIY solution is here:

http://coreyarnold.org/ibook/?p=20

There’s some good discussion on the apple pages here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1369476

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5968305

In this article I described the fix for the G4 motherboard fault, but it seems from the comments that more models are affected than what I described there.

SYMPTOMS:

• After being on for a few minutes, your ibook gets a blank black screen, the fan turns on, and the computer freezes.
• You can’t do anything at all except power down the computer by holding the power button.
• You restart and it doesn’t boot up.
• You squeeze the bottom of the computer tightly together just to the left of the trackpad, and it boots up.
• It tends to boot up when it is cold, but then stops working when it warms up.

Still unsure? Read more about the symptoms here and here.

Here are the results of a survey regarding the affected models:

When you have worked your way up the sites, and over the top, the lid will pretty much fall off like this.

These are the screws you need to tighten, there are 4, and the ones on the left are covered by a little piece of yellow sticky tape you need to remove and then replace after you are finished.

The tightening!

That’s it, now carefully put the sticky tape and lid back together, and replace the two screws. It should take about 1/2 hr to an hour.

This was the home of my ipod exchange program, which I was running because there was no-one repairing ipods in Australia, but I have discovered there is an ipod repairer in Australia, so here is his URL:

http://www.dcoda.com/

Last year I bought 5 non-working ipods from ebay and fixed up 4 of them. It was not to hard, but there was a couple of tricks. I’ve finally found some time to write up the hard bits, just in case anyone is interested, so here goes. This is not for you to try at home, lest you break your ipod!
The hardest part is opening the case.

I found the best tool was part of a stanley knife blade, the type that you break when it gets blunt. You can see the kind of blade I mean in the picture below. Two segments of the blade are carefuly inserted into the side of the ipod, at the angle seen in this picture.

When they are pushed down a little, the metal case opens a little. Then a third can be inserted in the middle. Then add a fourth fifth and sixth in parallel with the first three to force it a little more, the gap opens a little more with each blade inserted, until it finally pops open on one side like this:

Now you insert the blades into the top, above the hold switch and near the headphone jack symbol, careful not to push in too far and damage any wires with the blade. The case then pops open as follows:

The metal back is now separate to the plastic front, but be careful, the headphone jack and hold switch are part of the metal base – have a look at the pictures below.The white square in the red circle is the connector, it needs to be very cafefully prised apart with the knife blade. I used the long knife blade in the first picture above to do this.

Now the plastic case and metal back will separate apart. From the picture below, you can see the hard drive sits on top of the unit. It pivots on the right, but if you pivot it and try to lift it you will porbably break the connector, so you have to carefully insert part of a hacksaw blade (see left photo) in the gap between the HD connector and the main PCB board. Pivot this hacksaw blade down (right picture) and the HD connector will pop open, allowing you to remove it. The third picture (bottom) shows me pressing the connector together as I re-assemble the ipod. The connector is under my pointer finger, it needs to be moved around till it clicks into place, then firmly pressed.

The battery and main board just pull off and there are some small torx screws. There is a little connector that connects to the front that is tricky and needs to be prised apart with a blade, as seen below.

Happy ipod-ing, and I hope you never need to do this!

DIAGNOSTIC MODE:

If you press down the two middle buttons, menu and play, the ipod will reset. When the apple logo appears hold down the other three buttons (forward, back and the botton in the middle of the wheel). When the screen goes blank, release and you will be in diagnostic mode, with this menu:

A. 5 IN 1

B. RESET

C. KEY

etc

They select with right and left, not the scrollwheel. Some handy ones are:
D tests the audio, handy if the HD is not working but you want to check the audio section,

H tests the power circuits,
I tests the scrollwheel,
J tests the screen,
L tests the RAM, and
O tests the Hard Drive.