Startup Hang problem after power out

[apolaine]

Hi all,

I had a strange power down on my 1.67 Powerbook (running 10.4.3, 1.5G RAM). I've had odd power stuff going on (blank screen, dead in sleep, etc.) ever since I've had this machine, but the other day it completely powered off whilst still having 50% battery charge (power adapter not plugged in). So this could be PMU or RAM issue, but that's not the main problem:

Since the power down I can't reboot. I go from the grey Apple logo screen to a bit of the loginwindow.app's loading bar before getting a blue screen with the cursor and nothing else. Occasionally this flips back to a terminal screen and back to blue.

I have tried so far (none have worked):

- Resetting everything (PRAM, PMU, NVRAM in OF)
- Starting with Shift key (no joy)
- Starting in Single User mode, doing fsck, etc.
- Verbose mode shows loginwindow.app crashing, but this, I suspect, is connected to something else perhaps
- I've also tried variants of renaming startup files (inc. loginwindow) in the System/Library and Library to try and work around it. Closest I have got is loggin into my user shell
- Diskutil repairPermissions from Single User mode
- Removed extra RAM

So, I'm pretty much at my wits end. I don't have my install CD here as I'm overseas. I'll probably just order DiskWarrior now and get it shipped to where I am, but any other thoughts and tips would be appreciated. They can be pretty techie, I'm happy driving around the shell and executing commands, etc.

Sorry for the long post, thought it was better to give as much info as possible.