Best of the weekend to everyone!

This 5 year old iBook (256 MB RAM, 600 MHz CPU, OSX 10.4) has been faithfully operating until recently. It "locked up" and was allowed to shut down normally (but very slowly).

Now when attempting to start the machine, it slowly brings up the BIOS splash page (gray background). On pressing "C" on startup it shows the folder with a happy face alternating with "?". It then eventually shows a circle with a diagonal line on the screen and goes no further. I am unable to get it to access either the Tiger operating system CD or our Diskwarrior CD.

Where do I go next for troubleshooting? Do I need to open the case and inspect? I suspect hardware problems. This is like nothing I or my partner have ever seen before with Macs. We use and repair Macs, Windows and CentOS machines in our business.

I saw this on my wife's iBook about a year ago, and replacing the hard disk seemed to resolve the issue. If you have access to an external CD drive, you can attempt to boot from that, but hers didn't allow boot access until after the hard drive was replaced, and even then, only supported the integrated CD-Rom

I appreciate you sharing your experience with me. That is unusual but it does make sense with what I am seeing. I will try a new hard disk.