Chosen Solution
I have an iBook G4 12" 1.2 GHz 512 MB RAM, 30 GB Hard Drive. I just wiped the hard drive and did a system install of 10.5 from a retail disk. Quite often, upon restarting the machine I will get the flashing question mark. This is always cured by forcing the computer to shut down by holding down the power key and then restarting the machine. What are some reasons that this laptop sometimes needs to be restarted twice to get it to boot? Thanks
Try formatting the drive using the “Write zeros” option. This will map out any bad blocks so that they will not be written to. Then do your system installation, and updates to 10.5.8. Next go to system preferences and set your hard drive as the startup disk.
