Why won't my iBook startup?

Can you try starting up in Verbose Mode?

That might give some info into why it is failing to boot.

@johnpowell: Just tried what you suggested, but unfortunately I had no idea what to do. The last thing it was saying (in verbose mode) before I restarted was something along the lines of ‘checking for application services’ and kept repeating that every 3 seconds… I also tried single user mode but that was just as fruitless…

Boot from the macos installer cd and run disk utils. Have it do a permission repair. Another alternative is to boot into single user mode and do /usr/sbin/fsck -fy at the shell prompt.

Well, lets look at the positive,...it’s starting up! We had in the office that did this recently, right after we upgraded to Leopard.

Try to start your machine in Safe Mode , you do this by holding down the shift key as soon as you hear the start up tone. If the machine starts, immediately run Disk Utility to repar the disc and its permissions. It’s probably just a errant piece of code.

If that fails to work, try to create a new User profile (System Prefs > Users). Make sure you select your new user as the main one that the machine boots into. We did this on our office machine and everything worked fine.

If that doesn’t help, a quick trip to your Apple store will be a good solution. They are quick and know what to do.

cheers guys. Not at home at the moment but I’ll try both those suggestions when I get a chance to in a few hours.
@chaosrob: I tried single user mode but was unsure what to do after typing in that command, I’m not very experienced with all that stuff.

Ok, so here’s the deal. Got home, tried to put the system disk in but realised I had a dvd in there. damn. So I tried ‘itmustbeken’s idea of safe mode, which worked, and I repaired the disk permission etc. I think the dvd in the drive was acting funny too, but got that out and I’m glad to say this is being written from my computer! thanks so much to you all, saved my ass. Don’t know what I would have done if I couldn’t fix this, I rely heavily on this machine. Thanks again!

after you type in the command, press enter and then kick back for a while.

Aaaand now it’s fucked up again. What the hell?! Now I just get the ‘flashing finder/question mark’ icon. Or a blank white screen… please help! :’(

Might be time to do an “Archive and Install” reinstallation.

I think your hard drive is physically failing.