Uh oh. ibook g4 stuck on gray screen

[JoeJoe]

after my six year old daughter dropped it(on hardwood floor).

I tried this:
<command> <opt> <p> <r> Letting it chime 4 times. But, no luck - it just sits there witht the gray screen/dark gray apple logo and that thing twirling around like it's thinking.

********check that I've left it on and it has now worked its way to the blue screen. Cursor shows up and the twirling thing is gone(as are the little clicking noises inside like it's actually trying to do someting).********

Now you're really going to let me have it. I don't have any of my original disks.

Guess I should take it to the Apple store and see what they say(no applecare).

I was running Tiger(latest version) and the ibook G4 is a 1.33 with 768mb of ram if that matters.

Luckily all my photo's and music are on my powerbook and mac mini.

Thanks in advance if you can assist - even if your response is that I'm SOL!

 

[madog]

as are the little clicking noises inside like it's actually trying to do someting

Quite possibly the hard drive is damaged. If you can hear the harddrive making clicking noises [or any noise] when it never did before, then that's most likely the problem. All it takes is one drop to kill a drive.

To test this out, you can boot one of your other macs to target disk mode [hold down "T" while it's booting] plug it into the iBook G4 through Firewire, boot that iBook up while holding down the "Alt/Option" key and attempt to start up from the other macs drive that will appear in the list.

 

[nuclearwinter]

You could also hold Command + V to do a verbose boot and see where its hanging. If you can get to the command prompt, I would do a file system check. You can do this by typing

fsck -f

at the prompt. I hope it all works out! Good luck!