Are you serious? I used to be a member of the "black" (read: not on any payrolls) anti-reverse engineering department for an advisor Apple once used. The solution is obvious (although unfortunate)....
I don't know how you got to the manually mounting drive part, but here's your mistake there. When you tried to manually mount the drive, you initiated a trigger in the CMOS that alerted the BIOS to a nonstandard startup, which as you know, Mac HATES. This used to be standard procedure for reverse engineering (back in the G4 days, this stopped it), which Apple definately doesn't want happening. This starts the process of a permanent lockdown, essentially making it impossible to start the machine ever again. The first thing it does is short the hard drive, which makes data retrieval quite difficult (read: expensive). Also, there is a high capacity capacitor (ha, that sounds funny) which is attached to a resistor right above pin 32 of the G4 processor. It's quite tiny, so most people (even Apple techs) usually miss it. When that CMOS trigger initiated, it started building up a charge from a separate battery contained below the logic board (so reverse engineers couldn't stop it by removing the battery). The resistor has quite a bit of resistance, I believe in the megaohms. The resistor feeds right back into the capacitor, so any energy that makes it through is fed right back in. The resistor overloads and melts, which conveniently fuses pin 32 to pin 33 in the G4 processor. These two pins are the thoroughfares for ALL mid- to high-level abilities in the G4. You're lucky it didn't spread to 31 and 34, which would have shorted the battery (31 is + from battery, 34 is ground). That would've been a mess, but at least you wouldn't have to lug the machine to a dumpster. Unfortunately, that's not all. There is an embedded ROM chip on the bottom of the logic board which has pre-kernel access to the AirPort card, and once the CMOS trigger initiates, it tries to find a wireless network and report to Apple that a reverse engineering attempt has occurred, and tries to triangulate a physical location from local cell towers (little known ability of AirPort, got knocked out in G5 though). However, this timing is poor and hard to coordinate, so your G4 might have fried before a triangulation was established and transmitted. In fact, it's pretty certain since your 31 and 34 pins didn't short your battery, that means it was fast and the resistor didn't have enough heat to spread before it solidified again.
There is no legal premise for taking action against you, but if the physical location did manage to transmit, well.... I wasn't on the "enforcement" team, but we NEVER had repeat offenders.
If you're stupid enough to believe the above in this post, expect a visit from the enforcement team en route to your location.
This is what happens when you get bored at work (I honestly have no work to do).
