[vb15]

Ok here we go. About 2 months ago my computer crashed and I got the white screen. Every thought it was a hardware problem with the hard drive. Finally i took it to genius bar (no warranty) and they fixed it with Disk Warrior. I then bought a Lacie 1TB external so that I could back up my system just in case they didnt fix it for good.

After I set up the external hard drive, I partitioned it. Half for time machine the other half for my ps3 (movies,music, photos) and everything worked great. I erased and re installed leopard just in case and then booted with time machine and everything restored and was running better than ever.

Now last night my imac crashed again, (white screen with ? folder). I unplugged everything and went to bad. This morning it started up so I hooked up my external (which wasnt and hasnt been hooked up to the Imac since initial back-up) in order to back up all my new stuff, however I noticed that the Imac didnt recognize the time machine partition, only the PS3 partition. I ran disk utility and it could not repair the time machine partition which was now named disk01 or something like that. A few minutes later it froze and crashed.

Now this sounds like a bad hard drive but it cant be because it affected the time machine partition. Doesnt this mean that I have a bad file? So if I erase everything on Imac nd time machine partition and just start up , should I be ok? What do you guys think? This is very weird.

The only thing I really need are some old e-mails on my mac mail (which is connected to my school e-mail). If I do a complete re-install will I still have those emails when I re-set up my mac mail even though they are deleted from my school e-mail.

Has anyone heard of this problem. It cant be a bad external hard drive either because my ps3 partition works. Please help!

24" imac 2.4 ghz 320gb 10.5.6 Mac OS X (10.5.6)

[MacPC]

I would suggest do this first,

" If I do a complete re-install will I still have those emails when I re-set up my mac mail even though they are deleted from my school e-mail."
If your mails were deleted from you school email server, you won't be able to retrieve them, so back them up to a USB stick or something if you can, before you reinstall the OS.

then,
"Now last night my imac crashed again, (white screen with ? folder)"
This sounds like an issue with the the start up volume, (the internal drive.) try the followings:
Resolve startup issues and perform disk maintenance with Disk Utility and fsck. For now, I will say leave the external drive alone, take care of the internal drive first.

[chipchen]

Did you buy DiskWarrior? Sounds like possible file structure corruption. Run DiskWarrior. If that doesn't fix it.. re-format that partition and set it up for time machine again.