G4 screen is dead

After some malfunctioning and flickering, the screen of my powerbook4 g4 1.5ghz 15" has died. when i start the computer, the grey screen with the apple appears but after a few moments everything goes black. excluding the screen problems, the powerbook has always worked perfectly and i'm sure it still does. i need to recover data from this computer. i tried to connect it to an external monitor using the VGA adapter, the monitor seems to sense the presence of the g4 and it starts when i start the computer, but what i can see on the external monitor is only an empty desktop. any suggestion on how to display the g4 desktop on the external monitor? alternatively, is there a way for connecting this powerbook g4 to a macbook 12" so that it could be seen as an external hard drive? or any other suggestion on how to recover data from the g4 hard drive? possibly without having to do any operations on the g4, as i can see nothing on the screen. please answer with instructions comprehensible to a newbie, thanks....

How to use FireWire target disk mode

Read this article, it should help you out.

> How to use FireWire target disk mode
>
> Read this article, it should help you out.

thanks, but my other computer is a macbook, which does not support firewire anymore :-(
but i can try to borrow a computer supporting firewire... thanks a lot!