hey mac gods-

so, my iBook G4 is not working properly right now. as of right now, when I press the power button, it turns on and makes a loud wheezing from the fan, then the screen lights up with the Mac Apple and the thinking circle and then the thinking circle stays that way...forever. I actually haven't left it on to see if it actually clicks over yet but have heard I should try.

Events leading up to this: I bought a new digital camera and tried importing my photo's to iPhoto. One of my USB ports wouldn't recognize the camera at all. But the other USB port did right away. There were a few times that I unplugged the USB cable without "properly ejecting the device" before unplugging. *oops* I received error messages telling me so a couple times. Also, I deleted over 200 photos from my iPhoto as well.

I left my machine on all day on Saturday, came back home...and stuck a recently burned CD into it so that I could copy it into my iTunes. Now, normally, when you stick a CD into your machine, iTunes will open automatically and try to identify it, right? well, this time, iTunes wasn't opening at all. I'd click on the icon, the black arrow would pop up and the icon would jump up and down, and then the black arrow would disappear. I tried opening iTunes unsuccessfully more than a few times. I decided I'd power down and restart to see if that'd fix the problem.

Anyway, the wierdest part of this whole trauma is that before I powered down that first time, the Finder Menu on the top of the screen would appear and disappear numerous times, it was almost as if my machine was having a psychotic episode. I'd never seen any Mac do this before and this is what prompted me to just manually power it off. I thought about just letting it do its thing but I kinda got freaked out and just decided to power it off. And ever since then, it won't boot up properly.

A friend pointed me to a power up trick of holding down the open apple key, the option key, the letter P and the letter R, but nothing happened with that. Another friend told me this has happened to him before and its a simple preference setting that needs to be fixed.

I'm just really hoping its not a costly or too huge of a problem. Has anyone experienced this or have any recommendations of what I should do?

Your input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read this!!
xo/m-