G4 Powerbook reeealllly sloooww.

So my friend's G4 Powerbook has just started acting really slow. He gets a Beachball whenever he tries to do ANYTHING. Eventually it will do what he is trying to do, but it takes FOREVER. I told him to run verify the disk in disk utility, and it gave him some weird gibberish, and then said "The underlaying task reported failure on exit" or something to that effect, which is what my olnd G4 said when the HD was dying, so Im thinking his HD might be going?? He just got back from a trip to Chicago, could the X-Rays at the Airport have messed anything up? Any thoughts as to what it might be or do you think it could be the hard drive as well? Also anything else to try for troubleshooting? Im going to tell him to run the Apple hardware test when he gets home later, and see what it says.

trainguy77 said:

Well first off tell him to check the SMART status. When you click on the drive in disk utility it is at the bottom information section make sure it is verified. Next boot off the os x install disk go into disk utility there and repair the disk. Give that a shot and see how it goes. If the SMART status is fine then i don't think the drive is dying, however back up all important info as soon as you can.

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I had him check smart status and it was fine, however I wes under the impression that SMART is not always 100% accurate. I told him to back up, but he hasn't yet. He is out for a while, and im gonna call him later and run Disk Utility, and what have you. Were gonna try a Re-Install before all is said and done, B4 he gets a new HD.