iBook not booting -- have I tried everything?

[kmc]

I've got a G4 iBook running 10.3something that will boot as far as the gray apple screen with the loading icon and go no further (the longest I've given it is 20 minutes).

It hangs the same way if I boot into safe, single-user, or verbose mode.

Booting to the disk selection screen shows my boot volume, but it hangs as before from there.

It will not boot to CD (10.3 disk, Norton Utilities) and will sometimes give me a garbled apple on the gray screen.

It will boot on a Techtools Pro disk, and passes all basic hardware and disk tests but will hang on advanced volume tests.

It will boot into target mode, but will not mount on any other Mac I've tried connecting it to.

I have reset the Pram, and can boot into open firmware and reset the Nvram there.

I think that's about all I've tried. Any other suggestions?

Thanks much.

Update: Diskwarrior booted fine and seemed to be running great. It rebuilt the directory, I could see all the data in preview, and now I'm about a half hour into "Step 10: Writing optimized replacement directory". It is making progress slowly, but is this normal? I'm going to go home now, but I'm a little worried about heat issues leaving it running all night when it can't go to sleep.

 

[Texas Mac Man]

I hope you did not run Norton Disk Doctor on your HD!!!!!!!!! Norton is obsolete, no longer being supported & should NEVER be run on a HD with OS X installed. Norton will corrupt the directory where sometimes DiskWarrior cannot fix.

Cheers, Tom

 

[kmc]

Thanks for the tip -- I've never had much luck with Norton anyway.

Disk Warrior ended up reporting a few errors, but was unable to write a replacement directory. I ran it again and moved the files to a firewire drive, so my immediate emergency is resolved.

As for the disk problem, all the data seems intact and accessible by Disk Warrior, but the volume will not mount.