So I'm an idiot. I'll get that out there right away. I was trying to back up all my MP3s from my G4 onto an external HD. Well I had that same day managed to get my wireless network all up and running with a PC, Mac, Internet, External HD and printer. Everyone was sharing everything beautifully. Not wanting to mess with that I decided to back up all these thousands of MP3s over wireless to my external. This was going to take all night and then some so I just left it. When I cam back in the morning the computer was frozen. I shut it down, but now it won't start back up. The HD just makes some very audible clicking noises and feezes at the grey apple screen, if it makes it that far.

Any suggestions on fixing this or am I just screwed and need a new HD. Needless to say I probably should of just plugged the external right into the Mac and this problem would have been avoided due to the much quicker transfer rate. My G4 is already about 4 years old. It didn't need an all night transfer session.

Sorry, I think you'll have to buy a new hard drive. Don't feel too mad at yourself, though: an overnight copy session can hardly be considered disk-intensive, and a little bit of extra work was just enough to push it over the edge. The hard drive was probably on its way out anyway.

Well...after letting it set all day it booted up! I immidiately hooked up the external hard drive and started backing up some documents. It transfered about 300 MB before the hard drive gave out and the whole thing froze again.

Any thoughts on keeping it cool long enough to get some stuf off of it. Unfortunately the damn thing was engineered to get rediculously hot.

Well, the first thing I'd do is take the case off the computer. This will allow more airflow while it's running. If you have a gel icepack or something, feel free to use it, but make sure it's mildly cold (read: not frozen), and preferably not directly touching the hard drive. If the data is really important however, I'd recommend getting it professionally done right away, as your messing around with it could potentially make it worse.