[hickey]

Im at school right now and one of our G5's doesnt turn on, it goes to the blue screen and has the spinning black cirlce but nothing happens. It wont even force the disc drive to open bu holding the mouse down while starting up. HELP PLEASE! We need to make the DVD for our film festival before 2:00. HELP PLEASE!

[Big Mac]

Try starting up in single user mode and repairing the disk:

1. Reboot and hold command+s
2. When you get the prompt, type fsck -yf
3. When complete, it will either say DISK IS OK or FILESYSTEM MODIFIED - if you get the second message, run fsck -yf until you get the first message
4. When done, type exit

If that doesn't work, you could try booting into Safe Mode by holding the shift key at startup. And if neither get you going, you'll need to reinstall OS X.

[hickey]

I did your 4 steps and it started to cycle through a blue and black screen. Any other tips?

[Big Mac]

Yuck. You need to reinstall the OS with an OS X disc. It would also be a good idea to have Disk Warrior.

[hickey]

yeah thats what we started to do, doesnt look like we'll make our 2:00 deadline. Thanks for all the help.

[tooki]

For future reference, what I would have done is to put the misbehaving Mac into target disk mode (reboot while holding T), which lets you connect it to another Mac using FireWire, upon which it will show up on the working Mac's desktop as an external drive.

That would let you copy off the project and burn it on the working Mac.

tooki

[hickey]

Good tip tooki, and thanks to everyone else who replied too, you guys made me look smart while everyone else just wanted to restart it over and over.