[Catmafia]

I've had my G4 Powermac for quite a while now and since my PC decided to act up I've been trying to fix it up for use. I'm no Mac expert although I prefer them to PCs so I decided to come here for help. I'm having a strange problem where the Mac boots up fine, runs the OS fine but can't seem to open any files from the HD or run any applications. I tried using the disk utility but that didn't seem much help either. I thought it might be a permissions problem but it doesn't give me the option to fix permissions in the disk utility. I took a look inside the mac and there seem to be a few cables labelled P3, P5 and P6 not plugged into anything. Like I said, I'm no expert and I've been searching high and low to solve this problem. Has anyone had any experience like this?

[JackAndCoke]

Do you have the CD that you installed your OS from? If you do, restart your computer and hold down the "c" key. This will let you boot from the CD. From the CD you can run the disk utility and repair permissions and what not. If that doesn't work you can try and backup your documents and format the harddrive.

[Headrush]

Can you start "Console" to check the logs?

You can boot into single user mode using the -s option at boot.

From there you can:

mount -uw /
diskutil repairPermissions /
reboot

to fix permissions.