Mac G4 is stuck on the gray screen HELP!

[gingermonkey74]

Hi Everyone,

Can anyone help me? I can't seem to get my mac to start up, it won't get past the gray screen with the apple logo and spinning wheel.

I have tried to use utility disk to fix the problem but it kept coming up with error- could not complete. It would also not see the hard drive in OSX 10.4 when trying to archive before re- installing. So we opened it in OS 9 which worked and we could see the hard drive. We restarted the mac in OS 9 in the hope that we could re- install OSX 10.4 from there. It will go right through the installation but comes up with error again when validating. How can we fix this without losing everything and is it fixable?

Hope that makes sense

Thank you )

 

[djackmac]

You have two options at this point.

1. Connect your machine to another Mac through firewire. Boot your problem machine into target disk mode. Go to disk utility and create a disk image of the problem Macs drive. Save the disk image to preferably an external HD. If the image saves successfully try to mount it to make sure the image isn't corrupt. Then you will have basically an image of your drive. Then you may proceed to wipe the internal HD. Actually you may want to zero out the drive (this option is also in disk utility). If the drive zeros out successfully then try to reinstall OSX and then you can use migration assistant to migrate your data back. But using this method with migration assistant you will need to create a dummy user then launch migration assistant from the utilities folder and mograte the data after mounting the saved disk image.

2. Get a copy of DiskWarrior. This may correct the driectory structure corruption enough to either where the macine will boot on its own or at least get the volue in good enough condidtion to do the archive and install.