[jlemons]

OK, I need some help. I have a teacher that has an eMac running 10.3. The computer has been running great until this morning. When she got in she started up her computer and the screen stays gray with the white apple showing and the little wheel thing is spinning. It has been that way for about an hour now. I restarted the computer and did the reset-nvram and reset-all thing and still nothing. Is there a quick way to fix this without loosing her saved items? Please Help. Thanks

[SMacTech]

You can try starting up in safe mode by holding down the shift key. You may also want to start in single user mode, hold the S key down on boot. Run fsck -yf to fix any disk problems that may be present.

Whatever you do, don't erase the drive. You could reinstall the OS without losing any data. If that is not an option, and another Mac is available, you could use Firewire target disk mode to recover data.

[Dr. Smoke]

I suggest you begin troubleshooting this by running the procedure specified in my Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption FAQ. Perform at least Steps 1 and 2.

For additional help, see Mac OS X: Your Mac won't start up.

[Afreetibet88]

Okay here are some guesses to solve your problem

1. Try Resting the pram (i think you do this by pressing the option apple P and R keys right after you hit the power button relase the keys after you here the startup chim 3 times

2. get your install disks or sofware reinstall and reinstall the OS