iMac G5 not booting past blue screen

[iBookG4user]

Hello,
Tomorrow morning I will be going over to a friends house to see if I can repair their iMac. (They live a fair distance away so I'd like to try to fix it on the first time I'm there) They said that the iMac will not boot past the blue screen, and it was bought 3 years ago they said so it'd be the iSight version of the iMac. Unfortunately they didn't give me very many details about it and they aren't very knowledgeable about computers.
What I think I'll try so far:
Safe boot
Disk Utility
PRAM reset
SMU
Remove one RAM stick at a time (if they have two) to see if they are faulty
And if none of the above fixes it, I'll try Target Disk Mode and see if I can back up their data that way and see if a fresh install works.

Any other ideas?
I really hope it isn't a motherboard failure, it really isn't worth repairing it if it has that problem. What's the best way to check for that?

Thanks,
Joel

 

[chipchen]

booting only to blue tends to be (1) bad OS, (2) bad drive, (3) corrupted directory. Bring a bootable hard drive if you have one, try to run disk utility on it.

Hello,
Tomorrow morning I will be going over to a friends house to see if I can repair their iMac. (They live a fair distance away so I'd like to try to fix it on the first time I'm there) They said that the iMac will not boot past the blue screen, and it was bought 3 years ago they said so it'd be the iSight version of the iMac. Unfortunately they didn't give me very many details about it and they aren't very knowledgeable about computers.
What I think I'll try so far:
Safe boot
Disk Utility
PRAM reset
SMU
Remove one RAM stick at a time (if they have two) to see if they are faulty
And if none of the above fixes it, I'll try Target Disk Mode and see if I can back up their data that way and see if a fresh install works.

Any other ideas?
I really hope it isn't a motherboard failure, it really isn't worth repairing it if it has that problem. What's the best way to check for that?

Thanks,
Joel

 

[toolbox]

Did you happen to install the 10.5.5 update?

 

[iBookG4user]

Did you happen to install the 10.5.5 update?

They said they are still running Tiger, so no.

 

[toolbox]

Can you boot of the tiger dvd and run disk utility? or boot into single user mode command s and run fsck

Once in single user mode run this command

/sbin/fsck -fy type reboot to restart the computer when completed. I believe that command goes through 5 checks.