[chewie]

I have an eMac running OS 9.2. One morning, I found the machine froze up. I unplugged to re-start (I didn't know about the 5-second hold down of the power-up button for restart). Upon restart, everything was running very very slow. I cannot write files to my hard drive but I can read them.

Disk Repair cannot read the drive. Norton Utilities said "A major error was found in the disk's surface" and recommended repairing the bad blocks. After clicking "Repair" it said that it couldn't do it. Norton Antivirus found no viruses (the virus definitions are from 2002) but is could not scan the Netscape caches (or cookies? - I can't tell which they are - just a bunch of alphanumerics).

I have not yet tried writing to another drive (floppy, CD-R, ZIP) or deleting files from hard drive.

Help?!?

[Detrius]

You have bad blocks on your hard drive. That's what the Norton error says. You can verify this by booting from an OS 9 CD and running Drive Setup Utility's Test Disk feature. It will fail--pretty quickly too, probably.

Your hard drive should be replaced. You should take it in for service whether it's in warranty or out, as taking off the cover of the eMac exposes the CRT, which is not safe--i.e. it can kill you.

I'm assuming that if you don't know what bad blocks are, you also don't know how handle a CRT.