[whtgrower]

I am helping my local small public school with an iBook problem. (iBook 500, 10.2.?,320 meg ram.) Here is the chain of events.
-Would not boot, just shows apple symbol, folder symbol, prohibitory symbol. (circle/slash) No spinning gear.
-could not boot into single user mode to run fsck.
-it will boot from system disk ok, ran repair disk from Jag cd, everything ok. Tried repairing permissions from CD, it took forever, and I aborted it because it seemed to just quit. Funny clicking sound from hard drive when it hung.
-hardware diagnostic disk said everything was ok, including hard drive.
-diskwarrior replaced directory, said hard drive was ok.
-zapped pram, reset power management. This allowed it to get to gray screen, and a spinning gear, but would never advance further.
-tried to reinstall Jag from Cd. Took a long time, at one point it seemed installation hung, but when I touched trackpad, it seemed to get it going again, and it did install.
-machine would now boot on its own. yea! I repaired permissions, updated to 10.2.8, thought maybe everything was ok.
-I thought lets go ahead now and install panther. (clean install)
-Installation went ok, but now won't boot. Just get gray screen, apple symbol, spinning gear, will not advance past that.
-was able to boot in single user mode, ran fsck. Said everything is ok.
-Still will not boot, after spinning gear, screen now goes black, game over.
-went back and did clean install of Jag.
-this time it won't boot in Jag. Won't get past spining gear.
Question: Could I have a intermitent hard drive probelm? A firmware problem? If i get it to boot up on its own again, should I update firemware?
Please give me some ideas before I kick it.
thanks,

[pat++]

I would try to boot in verbose mode (hold cmd-V if I remember correctly) to try to see what's happening during boot and why it hangs...

[whtgrower]

[QUOTE]Originally posted by pat++:
I would try to boot in verbose mode (hold cmd-V if I remember correctly) to try to see what's happening during boot and why it hangs... [/QUOTE

I was able to boot into verbose mode. Here is a summary of what happened.

Waiting for core graphice display driver. (repeated several times)
Waiting for application services. (repeated several times)
disk 0s5: 0x8 (undefined)
crashdump hung! (pid 276)
disk 0s5: 0x8 (undefined)
error parsing attribute services-Disabling
crashdump hung!
/user/libexec/crashreported:crashdump hung!

Several of these listings repeated over and over, and finally just kept repeating the last line. Is it time to just get a new hard drive? I just can't figure out why Apple disk repair, Apple hardware test, and disk warrior all say hard drive is ok.
thanks for the help. What should be my next step?