i mac frozen

[coyote co jones]

Oh my God!!!! can anyone help?
i have an i mac g4 which all of a sudden has frozen before the blue screen stage of start up!! just the apple logo and the spinning wheel and thats it.
I have not added any new hardware or software. Please forgive me as i am not that technical. Oh i forgot to say i am running osx tiger and luckily enough i had backed up quite a lot of work as i write music it tends to be a habit.
But would really grateful if anyone out there could possibly help me find a way of booting up. I must say the i mac has been so reliable and this issue came as a sudden surprise!!!
Responses would be gratefully received

[gehrbox]

Oh my God!!!! can anyone help?
i have an i mac g4 which all of a sudden has frozen before the blue screen stage of start up!! just the apple logo and the spinning wheel and thats it.
I have not added any new hardware or software. Please forgive me as i am not that technical. Oh i forgot to say i am running osx tiger and luckily enough i had backed up quite a lot of work as i write music it tends to be a habit.
But would really grateful if anyone out there could possibly help me find a way of booting up. I must say the i mac has been so reliable and this issue came as a sudden surprise!!!
Responses would be gratefully received

Try to boot from your DVD with the OS X install disk. Restart your Mac and immediately press and hold the 'C' key to force a reboot off the DVD.
There are several other methods to do the same thing http://kb.iu.edu/data/ages.html

If it boots you know its either a failed HDD or the OS is corrupted on the HDD. You can run Disk Utility to check the HDD and there some command line options to check the HDD as well.

[coyote co jones]

Hi Bud

thanks but still no luck!! i ran disk repair and it comes back with keys out of order. Task reported..failure on exit. and volume needs repair. Does this spell Doom? i hope not!! at my wits end.......many thanks Tim

[nando2323]

Hi Bud

thanks but still no luck!! i ran disk repair and it comes back with keys out of order. Task reported..failure on exit. and volume needs repair. Does this spell Doom? i hope not!! at my wits end.......many thanks Tim

Ok,

You definately have a hard drive problem. Probably a serious one, if you can get into single user mode try running fsck and see if that fixes it. If you cannot get that to do anything, then I think a new hard drive would be your only solution. Also you can try a third party disk checking utility like Diskwarrior or Spinrite. Maybe if you throw in a new HD and re-install you hook up that one with an enclosure and still try to get your files from it.

Good Luck.