[docholiday]

I own a DA G4-733. Two days ago, my wires short-circuited while I was doing heavy duty work (ie. encoding a clip, surfing the net, burning a music CD). Oh, I have a surge protector, as well.

After everything was fixed (electrically), I fired up my Powermac just to find that when I enter my username and password it wouldn't log in, but would freeze at the login screen. A restart solved that problem.
Once everything loaded I noticed that Safari (my primary browser) kept crashing, and even though I am connected to the internet Camino wouldn't load any web pages. I tried reinstalling Safari, but:
a) I cannot mount anything (error 93 and 23)
b) When I tried locating Safari files by doing a search on my harddrive, the Finder relaunched and my dock was reset.

Going through the apps I noticed that about 1/3 of them don't work properly (windows media, ms office, sherlock...), and my CD drive doesn't respond correctly (when I put in a regular CD it doesn't respond most of the time and when I put in a CD-R it tells me my startup disk is full).

I restarted the machine and used the Jaguar installation disk. I ran DiskAid and verified the disk, it gave me a bunch of errors regarding incorrect volume size and sectors or sth. After repairing it, the same errors showed up again when verifying.

I am not sure what the extent of the damage to my computer is... I am guessing it's the harddrive - a WD80GB SE - that needs to be replaced.

Any help/advice would be great,
Doc Holiday

PS. To all Americans out there, happy 4th of July!

[mikellanes]

What I would do I see if you can boot back in and backup whatever you can, after that format the drive & reinstall OS X... see if that helps if not we can troubleshoot from there....

[reader50]

I would suggest a PRAM reset, followed by Disk Warrior. The problem appears to be disk damage, and DiskFirstAid cannot handle the more serious damage. The odd hardware behavior should benefit from the PRAM reset.