Powerbook G4 not booting

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Hi, for some reason my PB at 10.4 is not booting. I have not installed anything recently, like updates or anything, it just maybe gets to the Apple Logo and the gear, then that's it. Boot disks freeze when trying to find ATA in System Profiler, or searching for drives in Disk Utility. Short of Target Disk (no cable right now) is there any way Terminal, or anything else for that matter can be used to try to fix it, or at least figure out what's wrong? cheers

[yellow]

Everything you've described indicates a hard drive failure. Hopefully you have a good backup?

[QuarterSwede]

Did you get Applecare? and if so use the TechTool Deluxe CD and do a complete system test.

[Mr_Brightside_@]

Everything you've described indicates a hard drive failure. Hopefully you have a good backup?
Oh dear. Technically it's not *my* computer, but I will ask. What can be done starting now?
EDIT will resetting the PMU do any good?

[yellow]

Well, it won't hurt anything, but it's a bit of a deperate move. The power management doesn't do a whole lot with the spin up of the disk at boot. When you run Disk Utility from the installer disc and it has trouble finding the drive.. that a high probability of hardware failure. Of course, it's possible that it's a loose ATA cable, or a bad ATA connector on the logic board or on the drive and that all the data is fine... but given the age of the computer and applying Occham's Razor.. it's likely that the HD has failed.