Help: eMac won't boot, kernel panic

My eMac (1ghz, 768M ram) has been running slow lately, presumably just because it's old and I browse with lots of tabs. Yesterday it was hung up, and I heard a clicking sound, sort of a "tick tock" that I've never heard before. I manually shut it down by holding the power button.

Today I couldn't get it to start up. At one point while trying to get it to start up, I got some text about a kernel panic at one point, and I took pictures of the screen that I could post here if necessary I started up with my Mac OS 10.4 disc, and opened Disk Utility. I have a book that said I should do "repair disk," but the buttons to repair the disk, verify the permissions and so forth were all gray so I couldn't click on them and do anything.

I have a Firewire disk I use for backups. I made it into a bootable backup a long time ago, when I was using 10.3. When I'd booted off the OSX disc, I tried to set the external drive as the startup disk, but it wasn't there as a choice. I also have a more recent backup which is stored in a sparse image (created with Superduper) on the same drive. I tried to see if I could restore that onto the internal drive using Disk Utility, but it was gray, not recognized as a volume I could restore from.

So, how can I either repair the disk or restore from the sparse-image backup? Am I likely looking at a hardware problem?

I do have another eMac in the house that I might be able to use until I get things figured out, but it's an older one, 700 mHz with low RAM. I think it has 10.3. If my eMac's toast I'm going to have to get a new computer, which I was planning on soon anyway.

PS: I have a hardware test disc, but it's an older one that came with Panther. I haven't tried it yet.

 

I tried running fsck and nothing happened. I just got another prompt immediately. I think it is the hard drive that went bad.

I've got a backup computer running. I think the reason I couldn't boot off my Firewire drive is that I moved the System Folder and stuff into another folder other than the main directory on the drive. I'll see if putting it back helps.

I was planning on getting a new computer. My eMac had been really slow all the time. I wonder if that's because there was something wrong with it. Or, maybe it just died because I was filling up the RAM and I had the spinning beachball all the time.

I don't know if it's worth it to replace the drive. If I paid someone, it might cost more than the eMac is worth, and if I do it myself i might damage something. It doesn't use a 2.5" drive like the Mini, does it?

 

No, I thought you didn't have to do that sort of thing for OSX. I thought my eMac was just slow because it's an old computer now, and I like to browse with lots of tabs open, Itunes running and a few other things.

I'm going to go ahead and get a new computer. My eMac was already taking too much of my time, with its slowness.

Edit: I got the Firewire drive set as the startup disk, but when I boot it it says something like "waiting for local disks," I don't remember the exact words. The progress bar just sits there at around 2/3rds done.

 

Actually, I've fired up a spare eMac that only has 256MB RAM. I have two disks/systems I can boot off of: the original in the spare computer, and an external drive that is a year-old backup of the eMac that failed. They both have 10.3.9, but for some reason this eMac runs much faster on its own drive than from my backup drive. I don't get the beachball all the time.

I might give that "Onyx" a look, but probably not now when I've lost the original from the other computer, and I don't have a backup of the backup.