Please Help me with my iMac G5 - no icons on desktop

[deeinperu]

And that's IF I even get the desktop.

My machine is about 5.5 years old. It was working fine yesterday but this morning when I started it up, no icons appeared on the desktop and the hidden dock did not appear when I moved the mouse to the bottom of the screen.

I restarted it and it got worse. The desktop did not appear at all. The screen went from light gray with the dark gray apple in the middle to a pale blue. The only thing on the screen was the pointer.

After searching the forums, I tried unplugging everything and restarting the computer. It wound up at the same blue screen.

I restarted it again and held down the shift key. It started to start up but then turned itself off. (I held the shift key down the whole time so if you suggest I hold any keys, please tell me for how long).

I tried accessing PRAM by holding down the option and command keys along with the P and R keys but nothing happened and I honestly don't know what PRAM is anyway. I've been using PCs so is the command key on a Mac the control key or the apple key?

I've never had any trouble with my Macs. The only reason I got rid of my PowerPc was because the ports were serial and I couldn't find any cables for it to connect to peripherals. I've not had to trouble shoot anything with a Mac so please be really specific with any instructions.

As of now, I'm afraid that if I put a disk in it, I won't be able to get it out. Also, the desktop did finally show up after leaving the machine alone for 20 or 30 minutes.

Please advise!

 

[MacHamster68]

sounds pretty much like a dying harddrive ...and 5.5 years its about the time for
you could put in the install disc and try to repair permissions (on the installer window top under utilities ) with luck you can rescue some data form the HDD after that's done (if you can bootup again that is),here a how to and why or what its for http://guides.macrumors.com/Repairing_Permissions

normally the disc ejects if you hold the mousebutton at startup if the eject button on the keyboard should not respond , but it can take a while sometimes to convince the optical drive that you want the disc to eject by holding the mouse
iMac's rarely eat disc's

and the alt key is the option key and the command key is the key with the little

and for your question about pram :
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1242
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379

 

[BrianBaughn]

My first guess would also be the hard drive.

See if it will boot from the installer disk (insert disk, restart and hold the "C" key down...will take quite a while to start but you don't need to hold "C" down for more than 30 seconds, I would think).

If the installer disk will boot don't run the installer. Do, however, run "Disk Utility" from the Utilities menu, select your drive on the left, and click "repair disk".

I think you should report back here at that point.

 

[deeinperu]

Thank you both for your thoughts and links to additional info. I appreciate your taking the time to respond.

Yep, my hard drive was fried. I bought a new one and installed it today. It's now formatted and I'm installing my OS now. Researching how to do that has been educational. I'm really happy to have this forum and have learned a lot already.

 

[BrianBaughn]

Most people don't need to partition. If you were setting up some sort of file sharing in an office you might make a partition for that.

Just format, or erase, using the default settings and name the disk "Macintosh HD". Then install.

 

[deeinperu]

Thanks, Brian. Much appreciated.