OSX Won't Start Up????? PLEASE HELP!!!!!

Question

So I own a G4/1.2GHz/iBook w/Tiger OSX completely updated. The other day when I started it up, when it got to my desktop, it froze. When I restarted it, it would get to the blue screen right after the grey screen with the Apple and freeze. I finally got it back to the desktop and it was fine, so I cleaned the cache memory, optimized the system, and installed new updates. I restarted it as prompted to and now my computer freezes at the startup when the Apple shows up with the gear like pre-loader. Can anyone tell me what happened with my Mac and what can I do to possibly fix this problem without buying a new Mac or something? My schooling & DJing career lie within my Mac, most of my stuff is backed up, but does no good without a computer to run on...
Doesn't even get to a point where I can get into console mode as one friend directed.
Message was edited by: Patrick Hatcher
Message was edited by: Patrick Hatcher
Message was edited by: Patrick Hatcher

Answer 1

Have you tried holding the Shift key down on startup, and waiting awhile...
maybe up to 4 minutes, to see if it will boot into SafeBoot and if it tries
to and gets you to a login screen, you are almost there. After a login,
you can see if you can run the Disk Utility (in Utilities folder, see GO in
Finder menu bar to shortcut to folder, normally found in Apps folder on
hard disk drive) and run 'repair disk permissions' if it will allow.
Quit the Disk Utility and restart normally.
If you have the OS X Tiger installer disc, this is a bootable disc and
you make the computer start from the system on it by putting it into
the optical drive and then restarting, holding the C key down. This
will boot and show you the beginnings of the Installer; one of the first
screens after it starts up is a language screen. If you can see a menu
bar in the top of the window, click on some of the top items; beneath
one of them, a drop-down menu will appear with various options to do,
instead of reinstalling anything. One of these is Disk Utility. Another
is choose Startup Disk. You'd want to run Disk Utility's first aid and
choose 'repair disk' after selecting one of the icons on the left side
in that utility's window. That'd open the choices you can act on.
I usually run 'repair disk' and also look to see if the hard drive's
SMART status shows Fail or Pass (click on HDD's manuf. name.)
(Forget use of verify; just do repair disk; maybe also repair permission.
Later on, once you can start from the hard disk drive's OS, you
can repair disk permissions from that running system to fix them.)
If the Disk Utility can't 'repair disk' while the OS X installer is running
the computer and you are trying to fix the dismounted hard drive, you
may need to consider another utility. One such third party disk utility
that may attempt to repair the startup sectors on the HDD is DiskWarrior.
Another, Drive Genius, may be able to perform several tasks. There
may be one third-party utility that could do several things well, but I
don't know of any; some come close. And experience helps using them.
In some cases, a few of these disk utilities may run better from an
external FireWire enclosed hard disk drive; where a clone can be
used to boot the computer and you can attack the failed drive from
the larger volume of a big external hard disk drive with tools on it.
Being able to clone a whole healthy current system as backup helps
in restoring to a repaired hard drive or in replacing a drive when bad.
I use Carbon Copy Cloner, since it had good support and info in the
web page where it also can be downloaded from (Bombich software.)
Good luck & happy computing!