Time disappeared then my mac locked up!

[JG271]

So i noticed that the time, airport, language or time machine icons in the menu bar had disappeared from my Mac Mini (1.83ghz, 2GB, Leopard).
I went to system preferences and clicked on date and time but nothing came up. Just a blank grey screen where the date and time settings should have been.

After this i ran disk utility, which started beachballing , after which everything locked up, curiously however i could still hear music that was playing from iTunes and move the mouse, but this was all i could do.

So i hard restarted everything, ran disk utility again and it locked everything up again, did another hard restart and now spotlight was indexing my drive. However now everything seems to be quite stable.

Sorry for the long-winded post, but does anyone have any suggestions to what it could be that is causing my computer to do this and how to solve this problem, I'm worried it may be my hard drive.

Thanks.

 

[ewilson6]

your mac is doing self maintenance, it won't hurt anything


--Eric

 

[ewilson6]

download smartreporter if you think Hard Drive is going bad. It is free.

--Eric

 

[scaredpoet]

Disk Utility IS going to take a while and WILL beachball when you're checking your hard drive. Live checking a hard disk takes a while, especially if you have other tasks running (like playing music).

 

[JG271]

Thanks for the replies, I've never had any problems with disk utility in the past... probably because i've filled up more space now.
I'm still not sure why the time disappeared (this was before i started disk utility.)