[whtgrower]

I am helping my small local school with an iBook problem. The machine will try to boot, it first shows a flashing folder with question mark, then the apple symbol, then a circle with a slash through it, then thats it. I booted it from my 10.2 CD, tried to run the disk utility to repair permissions etc, and it gets about half way through than can't seem to go any further. I noticed that when it seems to stall during this operation I could hear kind of a spring loaded clicking sound coming from the hard drive. The CD drive seems to sound fine. I wonder if I just have a dead hard drive. It was able though to fix a few permissions before the utility seemed to hang. Any suggestions. I have not tried to boot it in target disk mode with my Mac yet to see if I can access the hard drive. Any ideas would be appreciated.
thanks;

[The Placid Casual]

Hmmm, hard drive clicking does not sound good at all.

I would try to boot into single user mode and run fsck a few times if you can.

if that doesn't work, I would look at a hard drive replacement.