Kernel Panic??!!, My G4 tower won't restart all the way! Options

[macintarian]

Hello good people,

I have a G4 tower, 512MB RAM, 800 MHz processor, OS X 10.2.4, 40 gigs harddrive. I think it may be "kernel panic" which I read about in previous posts with similar error messages. Halfway thru restarting I get a "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power Button for several seconds or press the restart button", with what non-english alphabets at the bottom. Again and again I try and get the same message.

I have a MOTU Fastlane Midi USB interface and a firewire cable for a camcorder connected to my machine(camcorder is unplugged from cable).

I don't know where or how to begin to resolve this problem as I can not even get the machine started. I would appreciate some advice to nudge me in the right direction without risking the loss of data on my harddrive. Thanks in advance.

[Francois Déchery]

except if you're used to unix, i would suggest you to restart from the MacOSX CD 1 (press C during startup to boot from CD-rom).

When the installer program starts, go in the menu and choose "Disk Utily".

Then choose the second tab 'disk first aid' and try to 'repair DIsk' and ALSO 'repair permissions'. If you get error during this processes, do it again, until all is fine (except some weird permissions problems that could remain, and could be ignored)

When its OK, quit, then restart (press Option to be sure to boot from the HD)

If its not a big problem, it should works

If it fails you can boot in single user mode (appleKey-S at startup) and play with the terminal to figure out whta's wrong. but if you're not a unix guru, you only risk to add more problem than you solve.

Next solution, find another HD (IDE or FIrewire), plug it to the mac, boot from the CD, install OSX on the second new drive, boot from the second drive, backup your data (home directory) to the new drive, then re-install OSX on the first HD...

HTH