Recently I had the pleasure of taking apart a tangerine iBook G3 clamshell. The symptom was the question mark on the folder icon at power-on. The CD-ROM drive reportedly hasn't worked for almost two years so I was unable to boot from any sort of repair or diagnosis disc. The computer is also sans-firewire so no target disc mode. After trying to usual suspects (zapping the PRAM, resetting the power manager) I resorted to taking apart the machine.

The first task was to replace the CD-ROM drive with another one. This didn't work. Either my replacement drive was bad or the motherboard has some other issues with the IDE controller. So I move on to extracting the hard drive and connected it to a firewire bridge. Disk Warrior didn't report too many obvious things so I let it rebuild the disc. I think the problem was that it just needed to be blessed.

Anyway, I recorded a time lapse of all this fun. Just under three hours in all. Enjoy!

Link to the video.
Link to the wonderful take-apart guide I used from ifixit.com.