startup prob (i read the sticky)

ive had my Ibook G4 for awhile now, and never had a problem like this. This happened out of the blue. I started it up today and I get a big error message in the middle of the screen. It has a power button in the middle of it and says "You need to restart you computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button."

then says it in french and some other languages, I tried turning it off and on again and nothing happen.

I don't know much about macs yet. If it were a PC I would say you have a virus but from what I hear that isn't much of a reality in the Mac world. I would just back up your stuff, reformat and reinstall, that always worked great on PC's

i dont know how to back up my stuff reformat and reinstall..all i have is the mac and a power cord

I read up and this sounds like "kernal panic" and most things say to reinstall with the cd, but I have lost my cd and all I have is my iBook and the power cord, what do I do now?

I would call up apple, maybe they can send you a new cd?

b ut then ill probably need some kinda info, i bought it from a friend

decay... why not just call and see what they can do? It won't hurt anything, moreover you will find out the info that they need. If you don't have it you can come here or to your friend.

Worse comes to worse buy 'em off of e-bay