Hard drive problem

[MatthewCobb]

My iBook G4 has been making chugging noises, and now refuses to boot up (get stuck at the grey screen point). I have been able to boot it in target mode from my MB and can see everything that's on it, so it's not dead yet. I used Disk Utility to verify/repair the disk, but it fails to do either, saying:

Invalid sibling link
Volume check failed.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error

So what do I do? Back the disk up and do a clean re-install? Or is there something nasty and mechanical going on there?

EDIT: OK, I am making a disk image - should I reformat/erase the hard disk and use that Or is it more reliable to save the files directly?

EDIT2: Come on folks, nobody seems to want to help me! I couldn't make the dmg file - it hung. I can no longer see any of the files via FireWire. I have fished out my copy of AppleCare, with TechTools Deluxe, and it finds there's a problem with the directory structure (all the hardware seems fine). It's made a new directory, but nothing seemed to happen, so I'm going through the whole process again.

Someone posted this
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070204093925888
which suggests that TechTools might not be able to sort this
Anyone tried this?
Help!!

EDIT3!

Non of The Big Guys (and Gals) must be on-line - no responses so far! Couldn't reboot in single user mood as recommended here earlier today:
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/343787/

I was able to back up some of the key files, and am now proceeding to a reinstallation of Tiger, which will (I hope) leave most things as they were...

 

[MatthewCobb]

OK, for those of you following this tale of woe...

Reinstalled Tiger keeping the previous users, got an error message on install, but was still able to boot up as normal.

BUT a) Microsoft database was corrupted (for various reasons to do with chugging mentioned in first post, I think this was the origin of the problem) and more importantly, 10.3.9 update wouldn't install. In fact, the computer then wouldn't reboot, simply giving me a black screen.

SO I am now doing a clean install, trashing everything on the disk and, fingers crossed, I will have a sparky new iBook in a few hours...


The moral of this story? Back up, back up and back up...

 

[MatthewCobb]

The final final installment of all this is that it was a complete waste of time. The hard disk was obviously failing - it started chugging again and when I went to verify permissions I saw that the SMART status was failing. So that's that. Ho hum.

 

[miniConvert]

Sorry to hear that Generally speaking, as soon as a hard disk starts acting 'out of the ordinary' it's a pretty good sign that you need a new one.

Like when one of mine failed recently, I'm glad you had time to rescue some things from the disk. At least gradual failures extend us this luxury, though with the risk of some corruption.

I hope you can get yourself a new one quickly, might be a good opportunity for an upgrade!