Mac stuck in start up - Won't boot

[biblicalfury]

My brother is having major problems getting his iMac to boot. I know there is a recent similar thread about this, but the situation is different.

It's an old one piece G3 iMac. I don't know the specs exactly, but I know there is a fairly small hard drive and not a ton of RAM. I think he's running OS 10.3. He was running with his hard drive very full (~100 MB of free space) and was downloading some files when he got a screen telling him he had to restart his computer now 'in a bunch of languages'. He restarted, but it gets hung up just as the progress bar on the start up screen is full.

I had him try to start in safe mode and nothing happened. He tried to start it in single user mode. He typed in the message in UNIX to start up in single user mode, but it hung up and displayed the message "Workaround Bonjour: Unknown error: 0"

Any ideas? I've never run into a problem like this with any of my Macs, but I'm starting to suspect that many this computer's time has come.

Thanks!

 

[ebel3003]

It could be that the hard drive is starting to go. In any case, you should take this as a sign to back up what's important. From there you could reinstall the operating system and see if it was just an operating system thing.

 

[JediMeister]

If you have a 6 pin to 6 pin FireWire cable, hook up your brother's G3 and one of your other Macs, start up the G3 in target disk mode with the 'T' key held down. That way you can access the drive as if it was an external and pull whatever files you need to a working system. This is assuming there isn't anything wrong with the physical drive.

 

[biblicalfury]

Thanks for the help so far-I'll give target disk mode a try today and see what I can do.