IMac boots into Terminal

Grandkids have my G4 iMac with OS X 10.4.11 installed and has only 256 MB of memory.
While a granddaughter was reading a Facebook listing the screen went black. Now when powered up the monitor remains black and is actually in the Terminal mode. Typing cal brings up April's calendar.
I re-booted inserted the Tiger CD and held down the C key. After booting up on the CD and getting to the install screen I tried several things. First, I chose the Start Up Drive and selected the OS X 10.4.11 drive---this resulted in the black screen in the Terminal Mode again. After re-booting on the CD again I selected the Disk Utility and repaired permissions---same result-the black screen in Terminal. Another CD re-boot and attempted Disk Verify on Disk Utility---resulted in disk error---same result when Disk Repair selected.
Basic questions: 1) Would re-installing Tiger be the best approach to resolve the issue? 2) Is there another procedure I am missing which also solves the problem? 3) Would exiting the Terminal mode resolve the problem?
Royal

The file's authoring info, album info, etc, may be lost, unless you can rescue the entire Music folder. If that info is in the actual physical file name, it is not lost. The music is still there regardless, unless something really bad happened to the hard drive.
It won't mess up the iPod, just make sure the machine that syncs to the iPod has the entire desired library. You can always transfer music between computers, and between computer and iPod, but not from iPod to computer.
Of course this is all subject to the license restrictions of the music itself.
Message was edited by: a brody

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