Will firewire target disc mode work if memory is bad?

My iBook G4 800mhz 640mb stoped booting osx 10.4.6 yesterday, all I get is gray, it will not even go to the apple logo screen and the HD sounds like it is going nuts. Lucally I have all my data backed up exept the project that I was currently working on when it locked up. I took my iBook home and connected a fire wire to my macmini hoping to retrive my project(which I have done a few times in the past.) this time the computer seamed to boot in target mode (the firewire symbol was on the screen) but the macmini did not see the iBook's HD. I tried a few tiems to no avail. I dug around in my closet and found my original osx10.4.3 DVD in hopes that I could run disc utility to fix whatever is going on. I booted with the DVD and It got as far as the grey apple logo and the spinning icon underneath but it hung there for about two hours with the HD going through what sounded like lots of searching. I had to give up at that point because it was 3AM. I do have a kensington 512MB memory upgrade in the iBook (which has been installed and working for around a year) and I was wondering if the memory could be screwed up causing the computer not to boot. Which leads into my question about the firewire target mode using the system memory. I guess another question would be will an iBook boot whith the only the original hard wired 128MB of ram and nothing in the SODIMM slot?
Thank you for any help.
-Jayson
iBookG4/Macmini/ iPod x3/HPtower x2/Dell(Lin)tower/IBMlaptop x2 Mac OS X (10.4.6) my PEBKAC
iBookG4/Macmini/MacPro/ iPod x3/HPtower x2/Dell(UNIX)tower/IBMlaptop x2   Mac OS X (10.4.5)   I cant seam to be able to RTFM

ooooooooops sorry to all you iBook G3 owners. I should not be let close to a computer until I have been given my caffiene in the morning. by the way removing the memory does not change any thing aparently.

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