Powerbook G4 Woes...maybe getting SR mbp after all

[masse]

My powerbook started locking up running programs last night and this afternoon froze completely. I turned it off and turned it back on a little after. It stayed at the screen and failed to boot past this. The hard drive was being accessed for about 20 minutes until everything stopped altogether.

I rebooted again to find it stall on the first grey screen. I cannot eject the disc inside to try to format the drive and basically can't do anything.

I'm new to macs so I'm not sure if there is something I can do here.

Luckily I set aside money for a MBP..

 

[masse]

UPDATE:

I got the disc out and it still wouldn't boot so I popped in the installation disc and that locked up.

UPDATE 2:

Opened Startup Disk utility in installation disk to find my primary hard drive was not a boot option.
I then started to run the installed and it stopped at the second screen again.

UPDATE 3:

Opened disk utility and locked up at Gathering Disk Information.

 

[dusanv]

It sounds like a HD problem. Would trying the target disk mode help eliminate HD as the source of the problem (basically, if you boot fine in target disk mode, it's the laptop HD that's faulty, right?)? Any Mac wizards want to chime in here?

 

[jorasho]

Maybe you should try the procedure as explained in http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

 

[masse]

Nothing is working...Cannot erase the disk or partition it etc.

 

[Aniej]

i don't understand, did you buy this refurbished or something or how is it that you are new to mac yet you are using a powerbook?

on a side note one of my powerbooks had huge problems and is literally on a plane to california back to apple in exchange for a macbook pro.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Maybe you should try the procedure as explained in http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

This is good advice and worth trying but I'm going to put my money on a HD problem, which fsck can't fix. Disk Warrior might though.