Powerbook G4 won't start up. HELP! URGENT!

To all of you reading this and giving your advice let me thank you in advance, this matter is quite urgent.
My mother is a teacher and has a powerbook g4 with the 1.33ghz g4 cpu and panther os. The computer was bought in the summer of 2004 and nothing has been done to the hardware. The computer has been working fine but over the last 2 weeks it has been acting up often during internet browsing, word, powerpoint, finder etc. the multi-colored wheel will appear and just keep on spinning and force-quitting will not work and a manual shutdown is what is required. Also of late the cpu fan has been making an odd noise much louder and weirder than normal and i believe it may be part of the problem. The big problem is that as of today the computer will no longer start up. When powered on it will either get to the apple screen and the circle will keep going round and round, or it will just be great, or after the apple screen the following error will come: "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." And these 3 errors just keep coming the computer will not start up. Trying to boot into single or verbose mode ends with unix screen saying Panic: We are hanging here. Unfortunately my mother can't currently find her mac cd's so booting from the cd drive is not a possiblity, i have a mac os 9 and mac os 10 leopard cds gotten from a powerbook purchased from a year prior and none of these work when booting from cd, an error message doesnt even apper i jsut get one of the 3 problems listed above. I would really appreciate any help, as the work on the laptop is absolutely vital, to get the work off i presume connecting it to another mac and booting up in firewire mode is a possiblity. But again any advice wud be aprreciated.

 

I'm assuming you can't even start up into OS X now? If you can, repair the Disk Permissions. If you can't start up, see if you can reset the PRAM.

I have instructions or links to instructions on the Troubleshooting section of the Mac Switcher's Guide.

If they don't work, take it to the Apple Store.

And what are you doing with a copy of Leopard beta?

 

Yea i forgot to mention i reset the PRAM and that didnt help, i do plan on taking it to the apple store but unfortunately the warranty has expired, so it might not do too much help. Hopefully i might get some good insight on this forum.

 

Yikes. The warranty is out as well?

Anyways, try repairing Disk Permissions if you can get into OS X. But still try taking it to the Apple Store; see if the employees have any suggestions or ideas.

 

Help me please someone!

My mac G4 power notebook cannot boot. It goes into the apple screen and the little circle keeps spinning and then doesn't do anything after that. It is also making a weird clicking noise from inside the computer. I have tried pressing apple+x but it doesn't want to boot anymore. Someone please help me... please please!

 

Seen that your Hard Drive is dead. If you have an external drive insert the OS install disk and boot from it, if you're able to boot from the OS install disk them its the hard drive. The weird clicking noise seen a bad hard drive.

 

To the OP. It is likely you have a bad fan, which is causing the computer to overheat and freeze up like you mention. The bad sound from the fan is a sign that the fan's bearings are shot, and when the computer turns on the fan sensor detects something wrong with the fan, which prevents the computer from booting up. That is my theory. I have experienced this issue just recently, go here to read about the details:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=245878

 

Good post, Stunner. My first thought was the hard drive, but your comments make sense. I hope for the OP's sake you're right.

 

Thanks bmwrob. I just took a look at the date of the original post and realized its from last year... I am going to PM him and ask him what happened to his computer... I'll post back here about what happened if I get any info.

 

how long did you expect it to last?

 

LOL

I wouldn't have noticed if you hadn't brought it up. Coupla n00bs . . .

 

Problem was due to a harddrive failure, after a harddrive replacement and a new os installation computer is up and running again and is working fine. However it is most likely the data on the old HD is gone.

 

What's with all the revival of old threads? I'll close it to prevent further bumping.