oh no! thanks for the reminder!

read this as well besides backing up!

btw, you may have saved the information on that disk, however now that you reformatted it, there is no chance.

How long did you wait with the flashing question mark? I hope you waited at least a couple minutes because there's a good chance it would have booted.

I waited for half an hour once while I was on hold to Apple Care... other times it was 5-10 minutes of waiting. At least I didn't have any important school or work projects that weren't backed up elsewhere.

I sure hope you tried booting up from an OS9 CD (if you have one), or some other startup CD with finder access. The flashing question mark problem does NOT mean you lost all your data, it simply means a system file was corrupted. Though as Ivan said, you've reformatted, so it's neither here nor there at this point.

Joshua,

I am running a G4 867 Powerbook and I had the same problem about 4 months ago. I was using the machine at home, turned it off and went to a clients house. I tried to start up and received the same error you got. After about 30 minutes of using the startup disk that came with the 'book, I was able to revive it. I had to do a few disk utility scans and It finally came back. For future reference, always try to startup with the boot disk and scan the drive. I have all of my data backed up, but a reinstall is the last thing I will do. Guess I'm lazy:) Hope you didn't lose anything too important.

It was (and still is...) an issue of failing hard drive, according to SMART. I'm in the process of backing up newly acquired music and other things, and tomorrow means a trip to the local Apple repair center. Maybe they'll make a mistake and accidently install an 80 gb hard drive instead of a 40.... :lol: