[HvyMtlMdns]

Yesterday I was using my PB in battery mode until I got the low battery warning. I then closed the cover and put the PB to sleep. I went back to my desk and plugged the power supply back in to the machine. When I attempted to wake the PB from sleep, the screen displayed a grayed out image of the desktop and then appeared to be going through some sort of "startup process" with little hash marks lighting up at the bottom of the screen in progression. After getting about 2/3rds of the way through the process, the screen got even darker and the fun message "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button." appeared in several languages. I did this by holding the Power button for several seconds until it appeared that the PB had shutdown. When I went to restart the PB, the same process occurred and I ended back at the same grey screen and message.

As of now, I have attempted the following:

1) Restarted only with the power supply connected (no battery) - Same result

2) Restarted with backup power supply - Same result

3) Restarted with charged backup battery - Same result

4) Attempted to reset PMU (heard tone) then - Same result

5) disconnected battery and power supply overnight and then reconnected power supply - Same result

6) Attempted to boot from Leopard Install CD - Same result

Any assistance in getting the PB to shutdown completely or restart would be greatly appreciated. The PB had been backed up as of Friday morning, so I would only be slightly annoyed if I lost the data (light work day). I did install Leopard last Friday, but had no problems up until this point.

Thanks in advance.

[mfbernstein]

Have you tried the Apple Hardware Test program (boot off the AHT CD/DVD)? Also checked to see that the RAM is well-seated (and perhaps removed one or the other modules)?

Sounds unpleasantly like motherboard failure. If your machine is no longer under warranty, you can extract the hard drive and stick it in an external enclosure to get your data off.

[Waragainstsleep]

Lets not get ahead of ourselves here. The greyed desktop and hash marks are just the machine restoring itself with Safe Sleep mode. When power runs out on these last gen PBs (and Intel macs since), the contents of RAM are written to disk and then restored to RAM when Power comes back.
The restart message is a kernel panic. Its more likely to be corrupted software than anything hardware related. Try a safe boot (boot with shift key held).
Try an archive & install from your Leopard Disc and run Disk Repair from Disk Utility.
If you still get the panic, try the hardware test and if nothing fails try verbose mode (apple-V). It will still panic (you should see the line "we are hanging here..."). Follow the text back from that point and you might find a clue to the problem. Words like airport or bluetooth would be good indicators.