Chosen Solution

iBook was fine, Optical Drive crashed, installed one from ebay along with a Mercury Legacy Pro SSD. After that screen goes black 30 secs after normal boot. Reinstalled the old HD, same result. Tried all the keyboard finger combos and removed replaced RAM. I’ve seen suggestions about an external screen but have no idea what that means. Using another computer in Target mode?? I love my old G4 and would really like to be able to use it again. I have an extra screen from a parts G4 from the past, might try to install that if I can’t get any solid advice here. Thanks in advace Update (09/29/2018) I DID IT!! Figured if it was running fine now with no shields or plastic I would spend my Saturday very carefully putting it back together testing it as I went. Seems leaving six screws out of the bottom shield did the trick eventually after about 4 hours or so of this and that. Anyway, thanks for everyone’s help. Something happened when I put in that first Optical drive and for two months it has been very challenging. Here’s my iBook with all it’s glory. The HP speakers are on an aluminum channel with felt on the inside as to not scratch the display. Really add to music listening.

These are the screw locations that are empty after hours of testing.

It might be the display inverter, the iBook has quite a few years life and inverters may deteriorate with time. Since you have parts around it would be a zero cost try. You can get some help from this guide: iBook G4 14" 1.42 GHz Display Inverter Replacement Update (09/28/2018) @oldturkey03 Here are the bottom of the logic board and top pics with detail of what I mistakenly took for the Pram battery. Hope that helps, if not just ask for more

:)

You should have a mini-VGA port on the side of your ibook. You’ll need to get a mini-VGA (male) to VGA (male) cable, plug the mini-VGA end of the cable into that port [it’ll have a picture of a monitor by it), and the other end into pretty much any PC monitor. If you get a picture on the external monitor then the issue is either with your built in screen (which will need to be replaced), or the graphics driver is corrupted (which you should easily be able to re-download and re-install using the external monitor). If you don’t get a picture on the external monitor either, chances are it’s the on-Board graphics chip [meaning you’ll likely need to replace the motherboard].