Not able to start up computer.

[Ann Towell]

I have a G4 and am unable to start it up. I cannot open the disk tray so do not know how to bypass the hard drive in order to start up my computer. I think i might be reaching my quota on available memory space on the hard drive. I thought it might be the battery and removed it for an hour and put it back in. A Mac person suggested that once to me, a long time ago. I'm using OS 10.4.11 I also tried keyboard short cuts such as pressing shift button when restarting or the X key. Can someone help me?

 

[Mikuro]

Can you be more specific as to what happens when you try to start up? For instance, do any lights come on, or does anything appear on the screen? Any information on when and how it fails will help us diagnose it.

Holding down the Option key during startup will bring up a screen that lets you choose from available startup disks before booting OS X.

If it does power up, you should be able to open the CD tray even if the OS won't boot. If possible, try to boot up from your Mac OS X installation disc and open Disk Utility (available under one of the menus in the installer) and click the "Repair Disk" button to have it scan your hard drive and fix any problems it finds. Disk Utility will also tell you how much free space you have on the disk.