ibook g3 not loading desktop

after the SO leaving the sims on overnight, our ibook g3 is unresponsive. we reboot, and it takes literally an hour to get to the desktop. just the desktop. no finder, no dock, just the wallpaper and the cursor.

any ideas?

more information: the computer boots up fine now, but at a certain point it will freeze up and the hard drive will tick exactly seven times, go chunkachunk REALLY quietly, then tick seven times again, etc.

hi! Unfortunatly, it sounds like your hard drive is going to die soon. Those clicks are the drive heads bashing agianst the metal platters. Back up you data if you can as soon as possible. How old is your ibook? You If it still has applecare on it, bring it into an apple store and have them fix it. If your ibook is an older model, it sounds like you would need to start looking for a new hard drive. Good Luck, and if you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask!

i went out and bought an external hard drive and went to boot the ibook one last time so i could move files over. it is currently stuck on the apple logo on a gray background. and nothing is happening. please please please give me some suggestions.

more info: i am booting it in view mode so i can see what's going on. notable phrases include: ""failed to configure a link-local address on lo0 (errno = 55)" and "disk0s10: I/O error." that last one shows up quite a bit, actually.

disk error is your external hard drive firewire? If so, you can boot into target disk mode if a version of Mac Os X is installed on the external drive. Then at least you could copy your data over. Oh and can you tell me what model your ibook is? that can let me help you on what to do next.

it's an ibook g3 700mhz.

it's a regular old usb hard drive. one thing i'm trying now is booting off a ubuntu linux livecd (god bless you, linus torvalds), then mounting the internal hard drive in read only mode and recovering the files that way. so far i was able to mount the volume, but i'm having problems getting in there and viewing the files in order to copy them over to the usb hd. i think it's an issue with the ubuntu cd though, so i'm going to try to burn another one today and try it again over my lunch break or when i get home tonight.

booting into kubuntu linux yields the ability to mount the usb drive and the local hard drive. the problem i'm having now is whenever i go into the local drive (read-only mode, mind you), my gui is freezing up. using konqueror or terminal, either way. i can view down to /Users and that's it. i need to go SU to get into the user directories, but when i do, that's when it freezes up. when i go into SU mode, does that somehow allow me to read AND write to the local disk? because that would suck.

right now i'm trying kubuntu in rescue mode. we'll see what this yields.

i'm beginning to think i am typing all this for my own benefit. :-/

alright. figured it out. BECOMING su automatically gives you write access to the local drive, which is not what you want when you're trying to recover files from a dead hard drive. PRETENDING to be su works like a champ.

sudo (pretend to be su) cp (copy) -v (verbiose mode) -r (recursive) /mnt/osx/Users/huzzah/XXX (source) /mnt/usb/ibook (destination)

and BOB'S YOUR FREAKIN' UNCLE! BOOYAH!