boot up symbols

When a drive disappears, the problems are pretty gross and obvious. Any version of Mac OS X should make it somewhat better, but they may not be able to fix everything. If you are lucky, they will get enough problems fixed so the drive can be seen.

Then boot from the drive with the Shift key held down to force a diskcheck and repair cycle as it boots up into safe mode. That will use the 10.3.9's built-in diskcheck to do the work, and it may be able to fix more problems.

If it is still not good enough, you may have to use an Industrial-Strength tool to recover some of your files.

This link explains it. http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1310

The Startup Manager displays all the possible startup devices - hard drives, partitions, CDs, DVDs, etc.

Does your hard drive show up in the window? When you boot, does anything happen or do you get some type of error message?

Will your Mac boot using the Panther install CD (or another system CD)?

Will it boot in Safe Mode? See
What is Safe Boot, Safe Mode? (Mac OS X)
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107392

Look at these links.

*Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck*
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

*Your Mac won't start up in Mac OS X (Mac OS X 10.3.9 or earlier)*
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106464

*Troubleshooting: My computer won't turn on*
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300552

*Power Mac G4 Resetting the PMU on the Logic Board*
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=95037

 Cheers, Tom 😉

Hi-

That's the Startup Manager.
Any system icons?
Typically, an OS X icon (or more) will be present. Click on a system icon, and click the right arrow to boot to the selected system.
The circular arrow is "refresh" in case an expected system is not shown.

If there are no system choices, your current system may be damaged, or a drive may have problems.
Try booting to the OS X Install disc, open Disk Utility, and run "Repair Disk" on the startup drive.

Hi, baht69 -

The way Startup Manager is activated is to hold down the Option key from the beginning of startup (as soon as the startup chimes sound).

If the machine boots into Startup Manager without you doing anything to tell it to do so, the problem may be that one of the Option keys (or its wafer switch) is stuck down, or there may be dirt in the keyboard shorting out one of the Option key switches.

If you did not also get one or more square drive Icons indicating drive name and OS, there is some damage to your drives. The Utilities on a System CD should allow you to evaluate, and sometimes repair that damage.

i get a blue screen with 2 small symbols

Use a Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X installation disk to repair the hard disk or reinstall the OS.

(40552)

Use the newest version available to you.

(40662)