lost!

im soo lost. i just got a power mac g4 from a friend and i cant get it to work it turns on and everything fires up but the only thing on screen is a file witha face in it and a ? and i dont know what to do

Means the HDD is dead.

so getting a new hard drive would fix it?

Yea it would fix it. You'll need an IDE Hard drive for that machine opposed to SATA. You'd have to install OS X again, but thats a good thing anyway. Depending on which G4 you have you can install up to Tiger or Leopard. Good luck!

Either the hard drive is dead or the friend you got it from formatted the HDD but never installed OSX back onto it.
The flashing question mark folder means it cannot find an OS to boot to, although 95% of the time it's because the HDD is dead yeah.

- Simon