problematic powerbook G4

My friend just had her PowerBook G4 die (1.33ghz, but that's irrelevant).

She described her problem as, "it boots as normal until it gets to the part where it would load my desktop, then just hangs."

She needs a few files off of her computer, but I feel like if her computer boots that far, it probably isn't dead.

So, if somebody agrees with me, could we get an instruction set on how to boot into single user mode and try to repair her file structure or whatever may be preventing the full boot? Or could she target it from her iMac and repair it that way? She's an editor so she has lots of cables.

She followed Apple's instructions to boot into target disk mode, and she says the host iMac doesn't see anything about the PB.

Thanks!

Hey man. Liking the tunes.
Read this thread and follow my instructions about using fsck there. That should help you.

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/apple-notebooks/152952-flashing-folder-question-mark.html

Cheers.

Which tunes? The ones I wrote and linked in the recording forum? Also, thanks for the help. I'm going to see if she can archive and install, if that doesn't work, then i'll try fsck!

Ah yes, I see you're a fan of my extreme doom/black metal XD haha. Sweet.

Here you are: Single User Mode

As for repairing some things from the command line, go through the man page for diskutil and take a look at what you can do (in other words, execute "man diskutil" at the command line sans quotes). Or, if you would prefer, read it here. So, for example, if you wanted to verify the pemissions, you would execute the following: (the / at the end is the root directory, or in other words, the entire computer).

thanks for the help. fsck -fy ended up working, so woohoo! a powerbook assumed dead since october now works flawlessly

Coooooooooooool!