IBook G4 grey screen/ spinning

greetings. old problem that i have read, but a different twist.

my problem: IBook G4 that recently on reboot is just sitting on the grey screen with the spinning icon as seen here:


what i have done:
basically followed apple's tips here
1- booted into safe mode; no change
2- booted into safe mode with shift-command-v to watch the boot; and it just loops around and around; no change
3- reset the nvram/pram; no change
4- booted into single-user mode; ran "fsck -fy" and returned with no errors and "...OK" and rebooted; no change
5- would move on to using my boot disc, however, here is the difficulty- my cd player gave out a bit ago and never replaced it.

so any suggestions? put in a new cd drive? would it recognize it? bring it into the store?

i have searched around and haven't seen what to do in my kind of case.

thanks in advance.

-jsm

thank you for the suggestions. i don't have either but am working on getting access to them. i originally was going to try to load the cd onto a usb stick and then run that in safe mode (something i have done in an analagous fashion with pcs), however, i read some people have difficulty with powerpc macs (not so with intels, i guess.) but this is definitely worth a shot.

thanks again.

success!

finally had some time to get a hold of my friend's computer and get to this...

i did what you suggested. worked like a charm. but before i did that i put my computer into target mode and was able to transfer all my files one last time onto a drive connected to the other computer.

only scary part was when i needed to put in disc 2 and i didn't know if my computer would read it but it did....everything went perfectly.

sweet....now onto updates and getting it back to up and running.

thanks for your help!