Freezing when trying to boot up

Hello all,
My powerbook has been working fine (though rather slow booting up for a while) until yesterday. When I turn the computer on (nothing external connected), I see my desktop background, the dock and the top menu with correct time and date as usual. However, none of the icons on my desktop appear so my desktop is completly empty and I see the coloured spinning wheel instead of my mouse pointer. It is frozen like this.
I have tried several things including:
Starting in safe mode, emptying trash restarting
Using Repair Disk in Disk Utility from my Software Install and Restore disks
I have a VERY full hard disk. Maybe 250MB free. Maybe erasing the hard disk would help??? I have an external hard disk I could transfer everything onto but I don't see how this is possible through disk utility. I seem to be stranded!
Any suggestions greatly appreciated as I'm well out of warranty!
Thanks,
Robbie

Hi, another1ne. Your hard drive is *way, way overfull*, and that's undoubtedly the root of your problem. You should have at least 5GB of free space on it at all times. With as little free space as you have, it's remarkable that you can start the Powerbook at all, and it would be even more remarkable if you could use it for anything. You won't be able to use it until you free up space: 1-2GB may be enough so you can start to operate the computer and continue to delete files from the hard drive normally, but not enough so you can use it efficiently or reliably.
Is your external hard drive FireWire or USB? If it's a FireWire drive, you should be able to start the Powerbook from your OS X installer disc with the external drive connected and install an OS on the external drive. Then you can designate the external drive as the startup disk, restart, and see whether the internal drive mounts on the desktop when the OS on it isn't being used to run the computer. If it does mount, back up the essential files on it to the external drive. Don't bother with system files or applications; you can reinstall those on the internal drive later. Once you've backed up everything important, erase the internal drive and reinstall the OS and applications on it. Or, if that drive simply isn't big enough to be practical given what you really need to keep stored on it, replace it with a bigger drive before reinstalling things. And in the future, try to keep at least 10% of any hard drive that contains OS X available at all times.
If your external drive is USB only, it isn't going to be very useful in your present predicament or in the future, because you can't boot a PowerPC Mac into OS X from any USB device. I recommend removing the drive mechanism from the USB enclosure, purchasing a FireWire enclosure to put it in, and proceeding as I've described above.

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