[Matt Taylor]

Forgive me if this post is redundant, I searched the archives but came up with nothing that answered my question.

That said, I'm a PC -> Mac user and cannot find a ulitity to scan my hard drive (similar to Window's ScanDisk). The only thing I found was "disk utility" but it will not let me "verify disk" or "repair disk."

The reason I'd like to scan the drive is my rather brand new 17" Powerbook G4 fell out of my top bunkbed (damn college beds....we sleep in the sky). The laptop hit the floor with full force, minus me diving for it and only slowing it down a bit. Luckily the lid was closed. It was in sleep mode, and when I opened the lid it was fine. <b>However</b>, I then wrote two papers on it, and shut it down, only to find the next morning on bootup that my two papers and a few other random files were corrupted, and all of my defaults (background, particular dock icons, screen saver, etc) had been reset to default.

All that said I'm afraid it's going to write data to a bad sector and I have no way of scanning the disk and keeping this from happening. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Also, this is offtopic from the above, but is there any way to keep those black lines from forming along the side of the screen/keypad? I'm guessing it's hand oils, unless it's something else I'm unaware of.

Thanks,
Matt

[iREZ]

Wont let you verify or repair? Go back to Disk Utility and check your S.M.A.R.T status. If it doesn't say verified, then I would suggest you get a new HD. If not try putting in the disc that came with your powerbook and hold down c at startup and see if you could repair permissions that way. I don't know what else to say, maybe a thorough inspection of your PB is in order.

You could try downloading software that verifies and repairs the HD, such as Onyx (free at versiontracker.com just run a search for it) and maybe that could do it for ya, and while your at it if you do run Onyx run all the scripts and complete optimization.

[icruise]

I believe that you cannot repair or verify a disk that is also the current boot disk. So you need to boot from another hard disk or a CD/DVD and then run Disk Utility.

[drive-thru]

Originally posted by Icruise:
I believe that you cannot repair or verify a disk that is also the current boot disk. So you need to boot from another hard disk or a CD/DVD and then run Disk Utility.

True. Put you OS X CD in the drive and boot up holding C. Instead of installing the OS, go to the Apple Menu and run Disk Utility. Verify and Reapir Permissions on your disk.

A lot of people here recommend an app called Disk Warrior, by a company called Alsoft. I've never had to use it for a disk which may be broken, but I use it occasionally to make sure my disks are ok. It's not free though.

[Matt Taylor]

Awesome. Thanks everyone for the quick replies and great help. I'll give this a shot and see what comes up.

Matt