[G4] HD's & Finder window shut down

[ewood at izoom.net]

> G'day, I'm worried about my G4, suddenly unresponsive by not letting
> me access my HD's located on screen (I have a SATA as well as an
> external) on the finder window or any folders/apps. when I click on
> them it just responds with a typical 'blink' like a finder reset. I
> can open them from the Home or Application shortcut, but lots of
> files are not responding, especially downloads (they just fail to
> load). My G4 runs on X.4.9, I've tried Disk Warrior/ Safe Boot/
> Reinstall but that disk is a 10.3.5 (would a latter one help). It all
> occurred after X11 was not being recognized by X11 required programs
> (Gimp etc.) so I 'apple deleted' it and reinstalled it from the
> optional extras on the disk, then the nightmare began, can you give
> me any advice, any would be appreciated
> yours sincerely Umar.
> umartisan at mac.com

This behaviour is the same for both drives, you say? My first thought is
to boot single-user (hold command + s at startup) and run fsck -y until
there are no filesystem errors to report. Not sure about checking the
external drive that way - best to fsck the boot drive and then use disk
utility on that after reboot. If the behaviour continues.. Well, could be
hardware or could be a bad system, but just what's wrong with it I sure
don't know.

Eric W.