Tiger Kernel Panic HELLLP

[entropicdecay]

My 15" 1.67 GHz G4 Powerbook decided it's no longer on speaking terms with me. I've been getting the Grey Box of Dismay for the past couple days. I managed to back up all my important things, like pictures I'd sold to a gallery, music, and writing iv'e been working on for 4+ years.

I got home from work today to try and resolve this problem. I turned on my laptop, it boots up fine. I open up firefox and AIM, and then everything freezes, except for the cursor. I restart it, it goes through the grey apple logo, and gets hung up on the blue screen. The OS loading doesn't even show up after 15 minutes. I try again and again and thank god that I backed up everything last night. Phew.

My question is this. Now what do I do?

EDIT: I tried doing disk first aid. I got the failure note that reasds "the underlying task reportd failure on exit"

EDIT 2: I just tried to install Tiger using my startup disks. I chose "Archive and install". Unfortunately, the install never gets past "verifying system volume"

[KWarp]

You're probably better off dropping by apple's support message boards. Lessee here...

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=120

I presume you still want to keep using the computer if you can. First off, see if you're under warranty (1st year of ownership). If so, take it to a mac genius and they'll fix your computer free of charge. If the warranty has expired.. dunno.. you could try installing the OS again and hope it works. See what the apple boards have to say about it.

[Effef]

I don't know that much about OSX, but from what I can tell that sounds like a hard drive issue.

[entropicdecay]

I just tried to reinstall Tiger again. Same error as before. My dad, who works with computers and keeps a news station on air for a living (lol, braggin'), thinks it's a motherboard problem. The hard drive works, to the best of our knowledge, perfectly fine. It doesn't make the "tic... tic... tic" of doom, it doesn't sound like machine gun fire, etc. He's dealt with other macs around work that do the same thing. I'll be sending my laptop in soon. Thank god we got the Apple Care program. $350 is cheaper than trying to fix this.

Thanks guys.