[Aramas]

Last night I left my G4 800 iBook running a freeware program called 'mpgtx' or something, in order to join 32 8 MB mpg files. This morning it appeared to be hung up on the first file so I quit the program. I then found that trying to do anything just brought up the spinning beach ball thingie, so I hit the off button and rebooted.

It just came up with the white screen with a black apple on it and one of those segmented spinning ring things, and has been doing that ever since. It's been sitting there for about 2 hours now with no change.

Any suggestions? I had to dig my old Evil Empire 800 out of the back room, and it's killing me! It's like using something out of the 19th century!

[Hi I'm Ben]

i dunno i'd take out the battery and totally reset it.

then reset the pram.

[bimmerphile]

boot up with the osx cd, repair permissions

hold "t" on boot to enable target disk mode, plug into another mac via firewire. pull all your data you want to save off the ibook.

reinstall osx

[Detrius]

Originally posted by bimmerphile:
boot up with the osx cd, repair permissions

hold "t" on boot to enable target disk mode, plug into another mac via firewire. pull all your data you want to save off the ibook.

reinstall osx

That's a bit drastic.

Boot the machine holding down command-v to see what it says. This will tell you WHERE it is stopping and possibly WHY it's not booting. This could be as simple as a full hard drive corrupting preference files or it could be as bad as bad blocks on the hard drive. In either of those two cases, an OS X reinstall isn't likely to help.

You should always have a backup of your stuff anyway. Repair permissions its vastly over-recommended. This isn't likely to make a bit of a difference.