Error message upon start-up with continued freezing

[danielgoodstuff]

I have a macbook with leopard and am currently having some big problem but am unable to see the solution on any other thread. When starting up my macbook the other day it took an unusually long time to start up, and when it eventually did, it displayed an erorr message reading "Disk Insertion Error. The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer," with options to initialize, ignore, and eject. I have seen other people refer to this problem after connecting their ipod or something but mine comes up straight away without anything put into it.

The result however is that the macbook continually freezes up now, iTunes wont open but instead makes everything freeze, spotlight doesnt work at all anymore, the same error message as above appears upon imputing any usb memory stick, when i tried to click on applications in the sidebar it froze again.

Any help or suggestions anyone has would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

 

[killerwhack]

A guess: Hard Drive is slowly failing

I have a macbook with leopard and am currently having some big problem but am unable to see the solution on any other thread. When starting up my macbook the other day it took an unusually long time to start up, and when it eventually did, it displayed an erorr message reading "Disk Insertion Error. The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer," with options to initialize, ignore, and eject. I have seen other people refer to this problem after connecting their ipod or something but mine comes up straight away without anything put into it.

The result however is that the macbook continually freezes up now, iTunes wont open but instead makes everything freeze, spotlight doesnt work at all anymore, the same error message as above appears upon imputing any usb memory stick, when i tried to click on applications in the sidebar it froze again.

Any help or suggestions anyone has would be greatly appreciated! Thanks

I am guessing here, but I would say that the hard drive is failing. Many times, a hard drive will start to have disk read errors but you don't notice because it re-trys and eventually the read request made by Mac OSX works.

When it happens often enough that the machine cannot boot or that the machine slows down noticeably, then the computer owner notices. You can look in the system.log file ( sudo tail /var/log/system.log ) for disk drive errors.

If this is indeed the problem, you will need to have your Hard Disk replaced and you will need to reload the operating system and restore your backups.

 

[danielgoodstuff]

thanks for propmt response

You can look in the system.log file ( sudo tail /var/log/system.log ) for disk drive errors.

how would i go about doing this? and what am i looking for?