Older iMac G5 won't start up some times

I have an iMac PowerPC G5 that I transplanted from my office when I upgraded last year. 1.8 GHz, 2 GB DDR, OS 10.4.11 with 115.71 GB available on the drive. We use it as a print server - hooked up via ethernet to an Airport Express - as well as various school work for the kids like internet research and Word. Lately it has started having startup issues. The center of the screen has a multi-colored box or the spinning wheel spins, forever. Once, a screen message came up advising me to shut down by holding the on button. When I restart it works fine. I have used disk utility several times - not much to repair. Is this a deeper issue?
Thanks

Hi.
Given the age of the machine and assuming that is the original hard disk drive, I would suspect the drive is beginning to fail, perhaps developing bad sectors that the machine is having trouble reading/writing.
If you have access to another drive, a FireWire external would do well, try installing a fresh copy of the OS on that. Then select that as your boot drive and see how things go.
In any event, I would backup any important data that currently resides on the internal drive before it completely fails.
I hope this is helpful.

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Here's what I did. (bold text represents what the computer did after what I did)
1) I opened the back cover.
2) I plugged in the power cord.
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Message was edited by: peganian

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Older iMac G5 won't start up some times

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