We managed to fix Ramesh’s dead powerbook on Saturday. Fixing a mac for the first time is an interesting experience for people like me who have been only fixing pc’s all these years. The toolset is very different, including Disk Utility, Firewire disk mode, and Open Firmware.
The fix ended up being that he has a bad superdrive, and we had to reinstall his OS X. For that we turned his machine on in Firewire mode, then used mine to install OSX onto his disc, and rebooted. This worked suprisingly well.
We also ended up taking his case apart, because we prematurely assumed a hardware problem, and so we were able to bend back the corner of his case that was causing him to not be able to use the standard apple power adapter. This procedure was decidedly more ghetto than the former, as it involved mainly a pair of plyers, but nonetheless effective.