I have a apple ibook g3 model m6497. i know its older. my laptop will not boot up. grey screen with apple but no loading spinning icon. when i hold down the options button it jumps into a blue screen with a picture of the hard drive in the middle, a refresh icon on the left and on the right is an arrow pointing towards the mountains

No. It's too old to use any of the online recovery tools.

no. It's too old to do it without a cd.

This us to vague to answer. Need more information.

put your system disk and boot from it
=> hold alt at the beginning
chose repair the system

Insert the disc (I know, duh), restart/start while holding down the "C" key.

I know this is an old question, and I hope you've already found your answer, but perhaps this will help someone.

Hold down the 'c' key when you turn on the laptop, it should boot off the cd.

The hard drive has (or is busy) packed up. That is the clicking noise you hear. You may obtain a new drive and install OS X (10) but to find those kind of CD's and hardware drivers may be quite a task

You may need to boot from the MacOS X CD to do a repair. Insert the CD in the drive, and restart. Keep pressing the C key to boot from the CD, once the CD boots, you may have options to repair your MacOS installation, or alternatively reinstall the system software.

With the OS X Installer CD in the drive, try booting your mac and holding down the option key immediately after you hear the start up chime. This will (hopefully) load a firmware boot loader that will show available start up discs. Hopefully the OSX installer will show up as CD Icon. Select the Icon with your mouse or keyboard and press enter to start up with the Installer CD. From the installer you should be able to erase and format the drive as Mac OS Extended before installing OS X.


If the computer still won't boot from the CD double check that it is a retail OS X installer CD. If your CD has "software restore" or "ibook restore" or any other varient of restore written on the label; or if it names a particular model such as "ibook install" or "imac install" it is not a retail copy and may not be a bootable disc. A retail copy will only name the version of the operating system followed by the word install written on it's label and usually have a brief instruction on booting from the CD by holding the C key at startup.


Hope this helps, let me know what happens.

Hi, Sorry you are having trouble,
Sounds to me like you're going to have to re-open that puppy and check all the connections, sometimes, when putting it back together, some cables are stretched and come un plugged...
Be careful, go slow...