Can't get past the Apple screen

Question

Hi. My Powerbook froze - its memory is nearly full. But when I restarted, the grey screen comes up, with the Apple logo, and nothing else happens. It's critical that I get this working, and I really appreciate any help.
Thanks, Ol

Answer 1

Hi, olparker. You're probably confusing memory (RAM), which is emptied whenever you restart the computer, with hard drive storage space, which isn't, and which is almost certainly what you have too little of. If your PB and the data on it are important to you, then presumably you've backed up all your data on other media. If that's the case, what you need to do now is get access to the files on the Powerbook's hard drive and delete some of them. If your data isn't backed up anywhere else, you may have to decide to give some of it up permanently.
The operating system on the hard drive needs a certain amount of free space on the drive for its own use. Without that amount of free space, it can't run, and that's probably why your Powerbook doesn't start up now. You'll need to start up from some other suitable disk or volume that gives you access to the Finder.
If you have a bootable clone of your internal drive on an external FireWire drive (the most convenient and useful form of backup), simply start the Powerbook from that drive, and use the Finder to trash files from the internal drive and empty the Trash. If you don't have a bootable clone, but you do have access to another Mac with a Firewire port, connect the Powerbook to it in Target Disk Mode and use the host Mac's Finder to delete files from the Powerbook's drive.
Throw away 2-5GB of files, but start out by trashing just a few items at a time and emptying the trash after every few files. Paradoxically, it takes free space even to empty the Trash, and loading the Trash up with too many files before emptying it may make it impossible to empty.
Choose large files to remove. Movies, music, and photos are often the largest files stored on a computer, apart from a few very large applications (notably iDVD). If there are large applications on your hard drive that you could easily reinstall from original source discs, those are good candidates for removal too.
If you can't comfortably reduce the amount of stuff on your drive to create 5GB of free space and maintain it indefinitely, you need a larger internal hard drive in the Powerbook ASAP. 5GB of free space is the smallest amount you should plan to maintain at all times. You can make do with a smaller amount (2-3GB) as a very short-term expedient, say for a week or two, but doing something as simple as burning a CD (never mind a DVD) under those conditions could easily put you right back where you are now, with a nonfunctional PB. With any drive of 60GB or larger, aim to maintain 10% of it as free space at all times.