I have a mac laptop (the G4) and it wouldn't get past that blank gray screen when I tried to turn it on. I then put in the operating system disk, and it starts to work, but when it gets to the point when it asks you where you want to install it, nothing comes up, like it doesn't think there is a hard drive there. I tried hooking up one of those external hard drives, and it recognizes that, it showed up on the screen immediately. But the hard drive internal to the computer won't show up. And now the cd won't eject either. Any thoughts?

Sounds like your internal hard drive bit the dust

You might try removing the hard drive and re-seating it, may just be a bad connection.

Hold down the trackpad button on startup and the CD should come out if it hasn't already. The hard drives used in these aren't known for their quality so even if it starts working again, I wouldn't trust it. Back it up and replace it, that's the best thing to do.

So this is what happened. I couldn't get it working so I bought another used mac ibook G4 off of cl. This was my wife's computer that broke, so she got that one. She took the broken one to a computer repair place, they said both the hard drive and the motherboard are no good.

Now my question is this, I want to make 1 fully functional computer out of 2 partially broken ones. I have a 3rd ibook G4 with a busted dvd drive and no wireless internet. The completely broken one is one of the larger ones in the metal case, my 3rd computer with the bad dvd drive is one of the smaller ones in the white plastic case.

Would it be possible to either:
A. Place the good main board and hard drive from my smaller one into metal case of the busted one (this is preferable because I would get a bigger screen) and use the dvd drive, screen, and wireless internet card from that busted computer.

or B. Swap the good dvd drive and wireless internet card from the busted computer into my smaller one.

Your best bet would be to swap the good DVD drive and wireless card into the smaller unit because the main board probably will not fit properly, or even at all in the larger case. I have very limited experience with iBooks - G3's only - but the main boards from 2 very similar models with slightly different processors would not fit inside the frame units of each other's machine - the boards were different sizes with a slightly different footprint - even though the outside cases were exactly the same size.

BUT- before you do this, try putting a new or known good hard drive in the unit that the repair shop said the main board was defective - it sounds like you only have a bad hard drive. If the unit recognizes the replacement drive, then try installing the operating system.

You guys were right, the problem was the hard drive. I got this computer back (I'm using it now), with the hard drive removed. I tried that hard drive on 3 other computers, only 1 out of 3 recognized it, and I quickly downloaded all the stuff on there onto that one. But then I hooked up this hard-drive-less computer to a big 500gig external drive, installed the operating system on that and it works fine.

1 more question, this one with no hard drive is the larger power-book G4, my other older portable computer (has no wireless internet, busted mousepad and dvd drive) is the smaller i-book G4. Can I just swap the hard drive out of that into this and have 1 fully functional unit?

YES you can! If it already has an operating system on it, it probably will work correctly when you install it - as far as I know, all apple computers use the same operating system. You should back up anything you want to save from that drive first, just in case. If, for some reason it does not work properly, then you could just reinstall the operating system after.

And, by the way, I would not do business with that computer repair shop again!