G4 freezes on log in

We have a G4 that is freezing on start up all of a sudden. Tiger OS I think.

Bought second hand a few months back and it came loaded with loads of apps. No cds. (We do have imac with snow leopard cd and also macbook with snow leopard cd.)

It's been running very slow and yesterday we installed cache x or some similar sounding name to clean it up. It's crashed on start up since then, although it worked fine immediately after installing while it was still switched on.

Now it freezes once you enter the password on log in and the rainbow twirly spins endlessly.

Tried the command prompt ( not sure what that does but tried it) and it showed the hard drive but when you click on it nothing happens.

Any ideas? If we needed to instal a cd how would we do that when everyhting's frozen up ?
thank you.

A G4 what? Is it an iBook? In any event, you're going to need an install disk in order to run some tests on the G4. If it already has Tiger loaded, you should get a Tiger disk that is for the G4 or a retail copy of Tiger to run tests.

It may be that the hard drive on the G4 failed but there is no way to tell for sure without running some tests. And for that you need a disk.

Since you have other Mac machines you might be able to access the G4 using Target Disk Mode. See this Apple LINK to learn how.

it's an IMAC power pc G4, mac os10.....not sure if that means tiger or snow leopard (?)

a little thrown with the fire wire stuff ....would it be possible instead to buy the disks and resolve that way? But how would we get disks into an unresponsive cd drive that deosn't open?

alternatively, could I simply instal leopard osx using cds for my imac snow leopard? There's nothing we want to save - a stright forward system reinstal would be fine.

The G4 is : 1GHZ 189GB, 1.5GB - think the OS was tiger but not 100% sure

I might be able to buy a mac os cd 10.0.4 cd version 1.1 - would that be ok for this comp?

What version of OS X was originally installed on the G4? You can't use Snow Leopard because that's for Intel powered Macs only. If Tiger was originally installed, you'll need a Tiger disk.

It looks like the hard drive on that G4 may have failed. If you have no need of anything that's on there, it may be just as easy to buy another hard drive and replace the defective one. Of course you will still need an install disk to prepare and install the OS on the new hard drive.

Your G4 uses an ATA hard drive so be sure to buy the correct one.