My Pismo G3 400mgz randomly started doing this thing where it will not finish starting up -- it freezes as it is booting up.

When I power on, the computer stars and the screen comes up with the little mac computer guy that starts spinning (normally this lasts a few seconds and it goes to my desktop), but it just stays like this until I force-shut it down. It continues spinning, so it doesn't completely "freeze".

Has anyone experienced this or could anyone give me some suggestions for troubleshooting? If it is helpful to know: I had recently saved a bunch of digital pictures from a new digi camera onto the hard-drive while on a trip, and I'm afraid that with only 64 MB of RAM and a 400 speed processor, this overloaded the computer. I'm not sure though.

Any information or tips would be greatly appreciated! I'm more familiar with troubleshooting a PC, so it was hard for me to even figure out how to turn off the computer when it froze!

Thanks all!

Nothing has been upgraded or replaced since I originally purchased it. It is the model with the firewire port.

Thanks!

what os is it?

you should probably start from the os cd and run a disk repair... or get Disk Warrior (IMHO a better choice for Macs than Norton) and do the same thing.

If you're running OS X, some more RAM might be a good idea. It's not supposed to run with less than 128. I'd recommend more RAM anyway for OS 9, since 64MB is not much these days.