Fsck, single user, and terminal cluelessness

[aaron321]

I've been stuck in Recovery Mode for a while with Tiger (10.7.5.). I plan to try and secure the data and recover/reinstall the OS on the drive that crashed and failed to boot, but in the meantime I want to try and use whatever means possible to get an accurate diagnosis.

Does anyone have information on how to use fsck, Terminal, or single user mode to start looking at different possibilities?

Actually, forget Single User Mode, since it didn't work earlier (it opened and ran it's opening test, but could not be used to enter commands) Only Terminal and Disk Utility seem to be useful right now, and it's probably a bad idea to keep rebooting my computer.

 

[Mr Rabbit]

If it's failing to boot properly then your best bet is likely booting in verbose mode, by holding command+V while powering on. This will present you with a console view of what is happening as the Mac goes through the boot process.

One possibility to look for is "disk I/O" errors, which would indicate a likely failing hard drive.

 

[aaron321]

Oh yeah! Duh. I'll give that a try when my external gets here. At least I'll have one more drive to boot from, then.