frozen startup, please help!

hello... I'm new to this forum and have had a hunt around but can't find the right answer to my problem... here's hoping someone out there can help...

I have a powerbook g4 12inch which wont start up. it does chime but then gets frozen on grey, or sometimes makes it through to a smiley and question mark. I have tried to start in single user or safe mode but no luck. The main problem is that I can't start it from a cd (i actually have a broken disc-drive but do have an external with a disk warrior cd and that doesn't go).

I am presuming that I have a hard drive failure here and have ordered a new one (to arrive in a few days) but I have seen that most forums related to hdd failure expect people to be able to start from cd anyway. does this mean i have a more serious problem?!

I did manage to get into open firmware and "reset-all" though i don't really know what i can do with this open firmware, is there any way to run a hardware check from it, given that i can't start from the system cd?

any suggestions on where to go from here? i'm slightly afraid that if i change the hdd it wont make any difference...?

thanks for your help

From all you describe, it sounds like a bad hard drive. Safe boot won't work because it wants a hard drive to work with. Is your CD drive Firewire or USB? Does your Powerbook support USB boot? Most models did not...

Yes, that sounds plausible. The external cd drive is fire wire. How do I find out if it supports usb boot? I bought it in september 2005..

I had a client machine last week in a similar situation. It turned out that because the HD was dead, it was blocking I/O communications, preventing the optical drive from functioning.

I replaced the HD and all was well.
Good luck!

Thanks, lets hope that is the case! i'll update this when i get the new harddisk and give it a go...

Yep, I got the new harddisk today and managed to install it (what a procedure...). Single user mode still won't work, but I can get to the chooser screen by holding the alt key at start-up and now get the choice to either run the hardware check or install osx from the external CD drive. Hardware check confirms that all is in working order.

First I was cheerful, but unlucky as I seem to be, osx fails during installation, blaming it on a faulty dvd!!. SO I will have to find a different operating system dvd...What a pain.
But the original problem seems solved. Anyway, fingers crossed