I have a 1.0ghz G4, 14 inch iBook, about three years old. Last night I tried to start it up, and it just gets a blue/grey screen. No apple logo, or spinning circle image. You can hear the hard drive make some clicking noises. It never boots to the apple logo, and after a minute or two, it powers off for a split second and then tries to restart itself again, to the same result. Is it a hard drive problem? Logic board? Help! It was working perfect three hours earlier!

If the hard drive is doing abnormal clicking, it is going to be the hard drive. You can boot up from your install cd and run a scan from Disk Utility and see if it reports any errors.

Its stuck on booting on grey white screen no cursor - nothing.

On peoples recommendations Ive held down various keys when booting.

Only things to do anything is target mode in which the icon comes up and bumps round the screen before freezing - the host laptop shows nothing.

And holding down shift shows two small gray icons with the little watch cursor which then freezes.

Ive tried Data Rescue II which ran for 8+ hours and then said it couldnt find files.

I have put in my mac installation cd on the recommendation of a friend but nothing happened and I cant even get it out now.

I really need some of the data but am fairly skint and dont want to have to take it to an expert who will charge a bomb!