Powermac g4 stuck on apple grey screen

[BRUUUCE]

Hello, I fear my powermac is stuck on the gray screen with the apple and the spinning circle below it. I've left it like this for around 40 minutes and still nothing.

I searched these forums for answers and tried these solutions to no avail. I tried putting a leopard install disk and holding 'c'. It sits at the gray screen for a minute or so, then the CD ejects. The screen proceeds to the dreaded apple/spinning circle screen. I also tried with my powerbook g4 tiger disks and had the same result. I also tried holding 't' at startup and a weird yellow symbol in the shape of a Y came up and bounced across the screen like a screen saver. When i let go, it continued. The computer turned off quicker than normal so i assumed OSX never got loaded.

The HD had no valuable info on it, so im not concerned with recovering it. However, I would just like a fresh install of leopard or tiger (i do have a legit tiger box around, but for now all i could find was my powerbook disks). What can i do here? It's very possible someone turned off the computer during an update or a reboot after an update. Did the hard drive fail? If OSX is loading partially, its an OS problem and not an HD problem?

what can i do from here?

thanks in advance,
Bruce

 

[PostTribber]

happened to me once...

when my dvd drive went belly up. you can see the green light as the drive boots. my dead drive didn't go to green at boot-up, so I removed it, then tried to boot. worked fine. replaced it with a newer dvd burner, and whallah! has worked fine since. hardware issues can be the problem. usually the pain-staking ordeal of removing each drive, stick of ram, etc, until it's located.

 

[n8mac]

Have you zapped the PRAM? (command-option-P-R)

Have you added or changed any hardware in it lately?

As PostTribber said, it would be best to remove all unnecessary hardware including extra ram and hard drives and all external devices except keyboard and mouse.

I found that OS X didn't boot in my G4 because two different HDD didn't get along.