grey screen on start up after upgrade failed

Hi all

New to the forum as its the first time i've had a mac!!

Generally use a pc but decided to use a mac for my music and browsing after several recommendations (and crashing pc's)

Got hold of a G4 from work and just tried doing a software upgrade. Installed everything ok but when doing the OS X upgrade it got 10% into "writing files" and crashed. Left it alone and it eventually came up with a fail notice and said it needed to be restarted.
Now it just comes up with a grey screen telling me i need to re start (in 4 languages) but does the same everytime I re start.

I don't have any discs and aren't particularly familiar with macs as yet so any help would be greatly appreciated

Cheers
Tets

What you're seeing is known as a 'kernel panic' (or KP for short). It's roughly analogous to a "blue screen of death" on Windows and usually occurs when there is a hardware problem or the OS install is damaged (which seems likely here - but was probably caused by the former).

It's kind of hard to advise you from here because several Mac models carried the designation of "G4". We need to know a bit more about the machine - in particular, CPU speed, memory, model (PowerBook, PowerMac, Mac Mini, iMac, etc).

Hi there

Thanks for the quick reply. Sorry other than telling you its a powermac i don't know very much else. Prior to me having it, it was used by our reprographics department at work so it will be a high spec machine (in it's day).

I've just re started it but this time it went grey but then loaded the widgets and normal background but i have no use of the mouse as if it has crashed.

I must add, I was using it perfectly until this upgrade failed which appears to have caused the problem.

Thanks again
Tets

So, which update did you install exactly?

I clicked the software upgrades and it had a list of available upgrades including airport software and a few others which all installed correctly and the one at the bottom of the list was the OS X upgrade which was the one that failed whilst "writing"

forgive me for my ignorance but i am fairly new to macs and thanks again for any assistance

cheers
Tets