700mhz g3 iMac Blinking Screen Of Death

[iamwhoiamtoday]

So, before I went to school this morning, my mother had me take a look at her computer. After turning it on, it makes the "booting up sound" and tries to boot into OS X Panther. However, instead of booting the OS, it gives me a blank screen with a small blinking picture on it. (the picture looks like a VERY small rendition of the world.) After questioning my mother, it turns out that she installed a security update, (though the Apple Software Update thingy) and after installing, it asked her to reboot. Upon rebooting, it gave the above error. Des anyone know what's going on? my mother is a very good end user. she isn't an advanced user by any means, but she is still good at using it. she doesn't open attachments that she doesn't know the origin, so on so forth. Is it possible that someone in Apple put the wrong auto update in that server? Or could have someone with melicious intent have inserted an infected file to the server?

 

[khehr]

Most likely nothing melicious, just a bit of bad luck. If anything got intalled improperly or if a restart happened before it was "officially" done, it could lead to OS failure. Reinstall the OS, no big, do an archive and install and nothing is lost.

 

[iamwhoiamtoday]

It managed to fix itself. I forgot to turn it off when I left for school, and when I came home, it was sitting at the login screen. I don't know what the problem was, but it's fixed. thank you for your imput, and if the problem hadn't corrected itself, I would have done an OS re-install.