[l8artist]

I have an imac (purchased in 2003 so it has the swivel screen and dome base) 17 inch monitor, and I have been using the maxtor onetouch external hard drive with it. Yesterday, I was trying to open applications from the dock and they would bounce like they were going to open, but nothing would happen, so I tried starting the applications from the hard drive directly, still they wouldn't open. I then shut down the machine, as nothing was frozen, and tried to reboot. Instead of the normal mac chime, there was a strange electronic beep and then a pause, followed by the regular chime. The screen lit up as if it were going to boot up as normal and then the screen went black with the following message:
/etc/master.passwd:no such file or directory
-sh-2.05b#
Please could anyone tell me what is going on?
I have tried disconnecting the external hard drive and restarting, same error message.
I was tempted to use disc repair, but I am holding off, just in case this is something that can be fixed without wiping my entire hard drive.
please help.

[l8artist]

I was running on tiger OS

[ibook_steve]

Disk repair doesn't wipe a drive unless you tell it to. Boot up with your OS disk and run Disk Utility and try repairing your internal hard drive.

Steve

[l8artist]

I ran the disk utilities and found there were a few errors on the hard drive, so I did disk repair. This still did not fix the problem. Upon restart, the same black screen came up with the strange beep before the normal mac chime.
The next thing I tried was reinstalling the OS, and for some reason it looks like this worked. Does anyone know if this will have solved my problem? OR am I being to vague with my question here?