[corona]

I've got a weird problem going on. When I power up my G4 iMac, the finder doesn't work. I can't see the icon for the hard drive or open up any folders.The only thing that seems to work is the dock, which appears when I move the mouse to the bottom of the screen. If I choose an application from the dock (other than the finder), it will open, but then freezes up.

To make things more frustrating, the superdrive died about a year ago so I've been using an external one, but I can't get a disk to boot up from it at startup.

Any suggestions other than throwing it out the window?

[Big Mac]

Things to try:
1. Single user mode fsck;
2. Hold shift at startup for Safe Mode;
3. Disk Warrior;
4. OS reinstallation.