PowerBook Will Not Start (Flashing Planet Attack)

Hello,
So my PowerBook is having trouble. I became frustrated with it and it's been sitting for a month or so, but here is my problem: I start up and get a light blue/grey screen with an icon of the world flashing in the center of the screen. This icon then changes to a question mark. After this is finished, I then get a black screen with a prompt that says:
+"etc/master.passwd: No such file or director+
-sh-2.05b#"
This just happened upon start-up one day. There were no symptoms (apparent to me) leading up to this. It just went kaput and I can't seem to find any documentation as to what exactly is going on here. I have contemplated trying to reinstall OS X, but I have a lot of important work on the hard drive. Any help or advice you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

Jonathan:
You do not give us any specs on your PB G4. Please include the processor speed in your profile, as it is helpful to us as we attempt to diagnose your issue and suggest possible solutions.
The flashing question mark indicates that your computer cannot find a bootable volume. From your description of how this came about, it is most likely a failed internal HDD. I suggest that you boot from the Apple Hardware Test disk that came with your computer and run all tests in a loop by holding down Ctrl + L during the tests. Let is run for a while as it sometimes takes hours for intermittent issues to appear.
As I suggested earlier, your HDD has probably failed. The solution is to replace it with a new HDD.
cornelius

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