Is my Ibook dying?

[benitac]

Hi all,
Im wondering if someone can offer advice on if my HD is dying, I am currently in Indonesia with slow internet and no mac shops so I am a little worried!!

Problem started soon after I bought a new battery for my ibook off ebay.
My specs are Ibook G4, powerpc, 10.4.10 (.11 stuffs up, long story), 1.2ghz, 786mb ram, 15gb free space.... maybe 4yrs old?

So not sure if its related to ebay battery or just age. Mozilla firefox was the first thing that started playing up, it crashed then kept crashing when i tried to reopen. I deleted all the firefox files i could find, deleted and reinstalled only to have the same problem.

Im now using Safari and it keeps freezing for a few mins (comes up as not responding) then it will work again for a while. Mac mail also seems very slow and takes ages to load and sorta freezes sometimes.

Yesterday the finder completely crashed and it restarted itself and today i turned it on and it made a beep but then the next time it worked.

I went into disk utility and ran a disk verification and this is what it came up with:

"DIsk utility stopped verifying because the following error was encountered: the underlying task reported failure on exit"

Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
%)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume free block count
Invalid volume free block count
(It should be 4265723 instead of 4145526)",2)

The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair



anyway any help would be most appreciated as i doubt theres much help i can get here (let alone trying to explain this in indonesian!)
thanks!

 

[iBookG4user]

Do you have the install disks that came with the iBook? If so, insert them and then once it loads (Hold C after the chime at startup) go to (I believe it is) Utilities at the top menu and select Disk Utility. Try repairing the hard drive from there and if that doesn't work create a new user account and start using that to see if the same problems occur as the other account. If the problems continue to occur under the new user account then you'll want to do an archive and install.

 

[benitac]

hey thanks for the reply, yeah i stupidly forgot the disks. I tried to use a friends macbook installation disks and it said i couldnt use them on my mac, the disk utility option still came up at the top but it wouldnt highlight any of the options to verify disk etc.

Also making a new admin account and running disk utility didnt change anything.

Theres a place here that fixes macs so i'll try and see what they have to say (should be a language challenge!), they might have the hardware verification disk or something!

thanks.

 

[chrismacguy]

Whats the SMART status. because there is a long record of Hard-Drives dying soon after this or the SMART status says Failed. You really need to get an external disk and start backing everything up ASAP.

 

[benitac]

SMART status says verified, it just comes up with an error when i try and click verify disk.

Also at which point do you mean there's a history of HDs crashing?