The iBook has been disassembled in my workshop. Googling brought up this ‘fix’, and much to my suprised, I coaxed a startup chime out of it. There is a stuck CD in the drive preventing the computer from booting, but after disconnecting the CD drive, I got a missing drive folder icon (yay!). I’ll dig up an old HD to see if I can install OS X on it via a firewire CD drive and see how stable it is with a shim installed between the logic board and the bottom of the case.
Now, the only challenge will be putting all these screws back in the right place…