Tiger Help NEEDED BADLY!!!!!!!

i am in serious need of some help getting tiger functioning again. yesterday i had spotlight randomly disappear from the top right of my screen (for all users), but it finder it kept on working. i tired repairing permissions and restarting, but that only made things worse. now all my folders icons are invisible and whenever i use spotlight in any application is crashed.

at that point i though it would be a smart idea to try and "archive and install" tiger on my system again. but that is not possible has the tiger installer cannot verify my powerbooks hard drive. i also tried using the disk utility in the tiger installer to see if that would help but it didn't.

i have also tried running disk warrior (version 3.0) and tech tool (version 3) off their cds while booting. tech tool just does not do anything at all on boot. and disk warrior gives me a kernel panic.

i am quiet certain that the permissions of my disk are beyond repair, so i will be needing to do a clean install. i would have already done that , but mac os x is choosing not to mount my external drives (that are Fat32).

i am in serious need of some suggestions. any help would be highly appreciated .

S.M.A.R.T. Status : Verified

gangst said:

Then your hard drive seems to be fine. However, I would be very aware that I think your hard drive is going to stop working so back up while you can. Something similar happened to me on an external hard drive when it started running really slow, then the icons for files disappeared, next thing i knew it had clonked out.

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the issues is that mac os x is not mounting my external drive.

dubbz said:

Do you have a (local) network you can connect to, for backing up your files?

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what i am going to try, is connecting my external drive to my windows pc and networking my powerbook to the pc and sending the data to the external through to windows machine. hopefully that will work.

i did just try the disk utility in the tiger installer again, and it reported errors when trying to repair the disk. that could mean the the hard drive in my powerbook is broken. or that i am in serious need of reformatting my drive, either way i should make backs ups ASAP and proceed with caution.

Thanks for your help guys.

andiwm2003 said:

i wrote that in some other thread so please excuse me if i'm repeating myself.

i had random problems in panther that looked like HD problems. repairing permissions made it worse to the point i couldn't boot anymore. the apple genius though it was the HD but it was faulty ram the wrote crap onto the HD so randomly folders, programs, permissions and files where screwed up. repairing the permissions just accumulated more errors. removing the ram and reinstalling everything fixed all problems. the ram only in the second or third hardware test showed up as defect.

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thanks for bring that to my attention. the ram in my powerbook is still the same ram that apple supplied me with when i bought it.

once i have made this back up, i will be sending my powerbook for repair,i have good reason to believe that there is a hardware defect on my machine (although i hope there is not).