G5 only boots to desktop image & Finder toolbar, then beachball just spins

My G5 only boots as far as the background image showing up on both monitors and the Finder toolbar loads but I can't click on anything in it, and the beachball justs sits there and spins…I tried DiskUtilities on OS X DVD but get 'Verify volume failed with error Could not unmount disk'. Then while trying other options got 'The underlying task reported failure on exit'. I tried to boot in Safe Mode, but when I release shift key after the grey screen and spinning wheel starts, the computer just shuts down. I have a 150GB HD that came with the computer. I installed a Maxtor 500GB drive in the second bay a couple of days ago. I've only had time to transfer about 45gigs of iTunes to it. But I had no problems with playing tunes from it yesterday. I worked with Photoshop CS2 a little bit this morning then shut the computer down. This evening it won't fully boot. Any ideas of how to get it back on track?
G5 Dual 2.0 GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  
G5 Dual 2.0 GHz   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Thanks! It has become apparent that I do indeed have
a few hours to kill before Diskwarrior hopefully
works it's magic. In the meantime I checked out
MacOSG.com, lots of interesting stuff and very
informative. I have had issues on this G4 I'm working
on now with garbled type on some websites so I
downloaded a copy of Font Finagler as recommended on
your site. But it didn't resolve the issue. I suppose
with this time of reflection while I await to see if
I'll have a repaired disk when DW is done, I can go
through fonts and start trashing fonts and see if I
can resolve that! Thanks again for your advice on my
disk issue.
Give FontNuke a shot.
http://www.macosg.com/group/viewtopic.php?t=12960
-Bmer
Mac Owners Support Group
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