Powermac g4 freezes on boot

[iulop]

My powermac g4 firewire 800 dual 1.42 gh 2gb of ram sometimes freezes at boot .That rainbow cursor wheel appears and my mac simply freezes . I am running mac os tiger on it .
Can someone help me please ?

 

[CooperBox]

I would tend to suspect the Hard Drive.
When was the last time the OS was installed? I'd start by a clean install. If you don't have a a Tiger disk, go to http://macintoshgarden.org/

 

[iulop]

I already did a clean install . Sure hope there is nothing wrong with my hdd.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Boot from your install disk and tinker around - if it's fine booting from CD/DVD it points to HDD being faulty. You could also try a live Linux CD/DVD and try the same.

 

[iulop]

Ok I will try that .

 

[weckart]

Ok I will try that .

The other one is failing RAM. I had hard freezes on my Quicksilver until the inevitable happened.

 

[AphoticD]

I already did a clean install . Sure hope there is nothing wrong with my hdd.

This happened recently to my PowerBook 17" 1.67 with the factory 100GB 5400rpm drive. I kept getting the spinning color wheel of death when running WebKit.

A quick look in /Applications/Utilities/Console.app revealed thousands of lines of "Disk I/O error". It started to fail like this, so I tried erasing the HDD and a clean install, but within a few days it wouldn't even boot off the drive.

 

[jerwin]

next time you boot it up, press command v when you hear the startup chime. This will start printing a lot of status messages to the screen.

If it hangs, note the error.

If you have good, steady hands, or a tripod, you can photograph the error for future reference. (I really shouldn't have to say this. but blurry pics are, of course, useless).
You can also boot the mac into target disk mode, and look at
var/log/system.log on the powermac's drive

 

[iulop]

thanks for the answer ill try that