After power cut laptop stayed on by battery.powered down manually immediately,but has not booted since. Will look for cd then spin hard disk but go no further,after a short time ram gets hot. any help greatly appreciated.can motherboard be repaired or replaced cheers dave

When you plug in the power cord is there any lightswhatsoever on the laptop, where the plug goes in or on the AC Adapter of thepower cord?

When you press the power button do you hear fans running, hard drive spinning,lights on the computer, hear any beeps or lights constantly blinking, hear theDvD/CD drive click and the light on the drawer of the DvD/CD turn on for asecond or two? If so the laptop is trying to boot or may have booted, butthe screen is not showing for some reason.

Beep tones and blinking lights tells the technicians what is going on with thelaptop and why it is not booting. Most times it's a motherboard issuewhen you hear beeps or blinking lights continuous.

Maybe your power cord is bad if you don't get anything to happen whatsoeverwhen you press the power button. And if that's true maybe you wasoperating off the battery the last time you had it on and since the power cordis bad, it was not charging the battery so the battery is drained and the powercord is bad.

Maybe you have a Static Charge Buildup. Remove the Power Cord, Remove theBattery, then Press and Hold the power button for 30seconds. After 30 seconds plug the power cord back in (leave the batteryout) and hit the power button to see if it boots. If it does, you can putthe battery back in and let it charge.Maybe your DC Power Jack which is where the power cord plugsinto the computer is bad. Take an ink pen and push the tip inside thejack and see if the little pin wiggles, if so the jack is bad. You'll have totake the laptop apart to fix it. Most times it is soldered onto themotherboard, so you will have to desolder the old and solder a new one.

You may have a bad hard drive. The "chime" means that the iBook was able to power on, and the white screen means that it foung the efi or firmware, but the fact that it will not go to the apple or the spinning gear means that it cannot detect an operating system on a hard disk.

Do you have the OSX CD? Put the CD in your ibook, power it on, and hold down the "C" key. This will allow you to boot to the CD. if the hard drive is still good, then it will allow you to install, if not then it will tell you there are no hard disks available. Hope this helps.

Turn the computer off.
Disconnect the AC power supply.
Remove the battery.
Remove the disk-drive.
Reconnect the AC power supply.
Turn the computer on.
Put any "data" disk into the CD-drive.
Does it display the CMOS boot-up display?
Can you hear the PC try to spin that "data" CD, i.e., trying to "boot" from it?
If it works "better" without the disk-drive attached, the disk-drive is the problem.

It seems that you laptop did not have the battery back up when the power was cut assuming that the battery was not charged or bad.
If so the laptop has crashed with a sudden cut off and could have damaged the hard disk in the PC.
If the set does not boot up even if the back up bios battery is good, then the possibility of the hard disk being faulty is high.

there should be somthing that tells you to press f12 or f2 to set up i believe your machine is not booting the hard disk first once you get to the boot menue you can change this setting

Have you left a cd in drive? It could be trying to read a disk to boot from if thats how your boot order is set up. This is the first simplest thing to check.

Char S

Remove the battery the memory the ac adapter,the hard drive, the cd rom.Press and hold the power button down for twenty seconds.try again if no go you will have to replace the systemboard.
Good luck

Possible hard disk failure or hard disk controller failure.
if you feel confident remove the hard disk and replace - obviosuly make sure that there is not power running and remove the battery - replace hard disk then battery then power and try again.

Do you get any beeps? is the hard disk clicking? listen carefully to it and post your findings.

Sounds like you have an exhausted battery. Even rechargeable batteries must eventually be replaced when exhausted. Try removing the battery and booting the laptop while plugged in. If it works, the battery is exhausted and you'll have to get a new one. If the laptop still doesn't boot with no battery, and you don't hear the whirr of the hard drive powering up and starting to spin, then you have a boot problem.

First, can it boot into BIOS setup? This is DEL, Esc, F1, F2, or whatever key your user manual instructs; press the requisite key immediately after pressing the power switch. Second, can it boot from an emergency recovery disk from the floppy, or a boot CD from the CD drive?