eMac won't start up, stuck on blue screen

[johnbro23]

When I press the power button on my eMac, it takes extra long on the gray screen with the Apple logo and the spinning gif, then takes about two minutes on the blue screen with just the spinning gif, then goes to a solid blue background, with a functional cursor, but no OSX.

I've tried trying to eject the CD tray at all points in the startup process to put in the Mac OSX re-install discs, but it doesn't respond.

What should I try before sending it in to an Apple store or Cupertino?

 

[CanadaRAM]

Hold the mouse button down throughout bootup - this should eject the CD tray

Put in the OSX CD/DVD,
Reboot the machine and hold the C key down throughout bootup

What happens now?

 

[iBookG4user]

Did you try holding down the mouse button when it was starting up, or just the eject button?

 

[skunk]

I would turn it off and restart holding down Cmd+S, then do a fsck routine, just for starters.

 

[johnbro23]

Looks like a kernal panic...

I've been out all day, so I've just tried your suggestions now. I got the OSX install discs, put it in after holding down the mouse button, and the attached screenshot came up. The computer was unresponsive (i.e. I couldn't type anything into the command prompt on the screen). I tried multiple times, with the same result. What do I do next?

 

[MacDonaldsd]

If you hold down alt when you boot your eMac, you should get a picture view of all your drives (hard drives/disc). If you have the original discs that came with your mac that should have a hardware test on that, so you can run that and it "should" tell you if you have a hardware problem.