[lula]

I have a Powerbook G4 circa late 2003 that doesn't feel like booting these days.
It gets to the blue screen with the apple and the progress indicator and then after
whirling for about a minute, freezes. Then I get the "You need to restart your computer" in a thousand languages screen which I guess is a kernel panic??? When booted it in single-user mode and try to scan the disk ' /sbin/fsck -fy' it tells me that I have an
"Invalid key length" and that the Volume Check has failed.

I have read of one similar experience where the user ran Disk Warrior which didn't help because it turned out to be a problem with the drive. I don't have my OSX install disk with me, so I haven't tried that yet.

My question is, does anyone have any idea whether this is a hardware problem or a software problem? Any comments, input and/or advice would be greatly appreciated. I'm kinda new at this...

[AppleCello]

sounds to me like the disc could be bad, but that disk warrior may be able to fix it. I have had some problems in the past that are similar to what you are describing and disk warrior took care of it.

give that a try.

[MARINEOSX]

My friends iBook had a Problem similar to that and I had to reinstall Tiger to fix it. I don't know what caused it but The disk check passed and everything worked correctly again after the install.

[lula]

Thanks for the advice. Turns out it was a hard drive issue - sad, but I was able to recover my files.