ibook G4 not starting up: root user

[harpinchic]

Hello! I am currently trying to help my friend with her computer, an ibook g4 which I believe is running 10.3. Last night Safari kept unexpectedly shutting down, so she restarted her computer and now it will not go past the grey screen with the dial. This is a used computer she purchased from a friend and the CD drive is not working, so we cannot load the install CD to try and solve that problem.

I have used previous answers to check the harddrive in single-user mode by using fsck -fy and the Macintosh hd appears to be OK, but when I try to boot the system in single-user mode, I eventually get the message "membered[68]: Couldn't find root user. Sleeping and trying again".

This is finals time, and my friend needs her computer back as soon as possible to access papers she has been working on. Thank you for your time, and I look forward to your response!