Gray screen, spinning wheel of death?

Question

Hi - I have poked around a little hoping someone else might have had this exact problem, and I do apologize if this has been posted before. Anyway-
My sister had a hard drive failure on her ibook G4; the Apple store just replaced her hard drive. Her symptom was the grey spinning wheel, which just kept spinning for five minutes. When I got her computer back a couple of days ago, the extra memory chip I'd gotten from OWC had been removed. The Apple techs gave us a note stating this had caused her problems.
Of course, I got worried because my trusty g3 has a similar chip in it! I'd bought them both from OWC at the same time and had someone (who was rather rough - but I couldn't get it in myself) install them for us. So I grabbed the Techtool Deluxe disk from work, booted from the disk, and ran the tests. Everything passed except that there was some volume damage. I then elected to let techtool repair the drive - which took forever. Stupidly, perhaps, I aborted the repair about 3/4 of the way through and checked my email. (It was then after midnight, and the disk had been spinning away, between tests and repair, for close to five hours.) The machine rebooted and got my mail, but was extremely sluggish. I forced mail to quit, then shut it down. But I had a bad feeling.
This morning, I tried to boot up, and got the normal chime and then the spinning wheel - for five minutes. I could hear no sounds from the hard drive.
Fortunately, I have much of my data saved to my .mac com account and to an external firewire drive. So I haven't lost everything. But I'd really like to save this little machine if I can. I thought about removing the memory chip and trying to boot, but I can't remember if it's the upper chip or the lower one! Should I try to do this? (Taking out one chip at a time?) And should I take it in to have the backup battery replaced (I've owned it for nearly four years now, and, so far as I know, the battery has never been replaced.) Is there anything else I can do, or is this machine dead?
I have the original system disks, Jaguar, and a tiger DVD - not sure, however, if I can boot it from the external dvd drive, or any disk at all at this point. The only symptoms I'd had previously were a failure to shut down after I'd backed up stuff to my idisk and one previous cranky (but perfectly normal, once it got going) startup. I'm afraid I may have made matters worse by interrupting the repair in progress. It's a dual boot g3 700 mhz, running Tiger 10.4.11. Including the possibly defective chip, it has 768 megs of ram. It's been a great machine, and I was counting on having it for another year or two. TIA for your help!

Answer 1

RAM can go bad after it's been working, although it's not that common. I don't think it's ever happened to me. OWC has a lifetime warranty on RAM, so your sister may want to contact OWC.
I installed Tiger from the DVD using my firewire LaCie DVD/CD writer/reader. It's the same way I've installed other programs from DVD, but I never attempted to boot the machine this way.
Since you have to boot from the installation disc to install Tiger, you must have used that external DVD drive to boot the iMac before.
If you can run boot from the Tiger DVD, do so. Then, at the first Installer screen (after language selection), go up to the Installer's menu under Utilities and select to run +Disk Utility+. Then, select the internal drive in the sidebar and run +Repair Disk+ in the +First Aid+ tab. Note if any errors are reported and, if so, see if Disk Utility was able to repair the damaged.
If Disk Utility is not able to fix the error, you can let TechTool have another shot.
Alternately, before any more repair attempts, you can do the following to try to save your data that was not backed up before attempting repair. Start up your iMac in +FireWire Target Disk Mode+.
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1661
This procedure turns your iMac into an external FireWire hard drive. Then connect it to your sister's iBook using a regular FireWire cable. The iMac's hard drive will hopefully appear on the iBook's desktop; disk directory damage sometimes prevents startup, but the drive may still be accessible if it's not the startup drive. If it does mount to the iBooks desktop, save off those important files right away.
Once you have all the files you need, the best course of action may be to erase the drive and give the iMac a fresh start.