iBook Won't Start, Applications Won't Load, Photos? HELP!!!!!

I have a G4 iBook which I believe is a 2005 model. I have never changed the battery, and after about a year and a half of owning it I had to start leaving it plugged in all the time or else it would die once unplugged.

I had about 4,500 pictures in my iPhoto, most of which were from a 5.1 megapixel camera. About 6 weeks ago I began uploading photos from a new camera, which is 12.1 megapixels. I noticed that the iBook became very slow and would freeze up more often since I began uploading photos from this camera.

Two days ago I uploaded about 120 photos, the biggest upload I had yet done with this camera, and that night the iBook froze up completely and I had to force quit. Ever since then, it will not properly start up. It loads my desktop background photo, and the Finder toolbar, but then the cursor becomes that "candy cane" thing and will not load any applications or go any further.

Could it be that the hard drive was overwhelmed with the sudden increase in file size of my photos? Do I need to take it into an Apple store for repair, or does anyone know of any kind of quick fix I can try at home? I am terrified my iPhoto and iTunes are gone and wont be able to be recovered. I have never had a problem with my iBook that is this serious, and I am scared.

Do you have the original Install Discs that came with your G4 iBook Leah2359?

If so, you need to boot from the Installation disc and navigate to Disc Utilities and Repair Permissions and Verify the Hard Drive. When you pop the disc in the drive, press the power button and upon hearing the startup chime, hold down the "C" key. This will force the iBook to boot of the disc drive instead of the internal HD.

After clicking through a few preliminary dialogue windows, you should see a Menubar at the top of the screen ... click on Utilities and select Disc Utility.

Report back on how things go ....

Do you have access to another Mac? If your Mac has Firewire and you can get hold of another Firewire Mac then you can save your music/files/photos and that's gotta be a good thing!

Thanks for the info. I actually spoke to an Apple technician who also suggested the Install Disk. Unfortunately this laptop was given to me when I was a student by a school who, shall we say, didn't employ the most professional or intellegent staff, and they seem to have not given me the Install Disk. So I finally broke down and just took it to Geek Squad. I am expecting to hear from them today, and will report what the issue was and if it was fixed or not.

I strongly recommend you source a set of Install Discs for your iBook Leah as sooner or later they are going to save you a lot of hassle/time/money .... pay close attention to the type of discs you need as there are a lot of Model Specific discs for sale out there and they only work with the actual model that they were originally released with. Look for a Full Retail Version which is identifiable by the different coloured labels and either a large number for the OS Version, ie: 8, 9 etc or a large X against a black label. Any grey labelled discs are Model Specific so don't fall into that trap as many have.

This link shows the different labels of the Full Retail Versions out there.

Another important point is not to accidentally buy an Upgrade set of Full Retail discs because AFAIK, they require a certain version of Mac OS to already be installed on your Mac and won't work for standalone installations which are needed to wipe any currently installed OSs or are needed to be installed on a blank formatted Hard Drive.

EG: If you had a newer OS installed and wanted to install a previous version of Mac OS on an older machine, say Panther over Tiger or OS 9 over Panther, Jaguar etc, then an Upgrade Disc won't work.