[hds272]

After my mac appeared slow I did a disk utility and it didn't work when I tried to verify the disk. Around the same time my safari started crashing. Then I got an autoupdate thing and it couldn't update the power book thing and told me to restart.

No when I tried to reboot my powerbook G4 it gets to the gray apple then the screen turns blue and the loading osx thing pops up but wont progress. Even getting to that points is a bit long. Help!

[imitchellg5]

It sounds to me like you have a bad hard drive. Boot of of your OS X install disc and open Disk Utility. Run "Verify Disk" if you can.

[hds272]

Im on vacation so I dont have the disk. So I tried safe mode which failed and then booted with apple+S for single user command line to run fsck which didn't work either....

[seanc]

Do you have backups? If not, stop trying to use the laptop or you may end up with the hard drive dead completely which will mean either 0 data or lots of £££ to get it back.

Three solutions:
1. Buy a MacBook/Pro laptop and a Firewire cable. Boot the PowerBook into Target Disk Mode, hope it mounts and hope that you can recover your data from it.
2. Replace the drive in the PowerBook, put the old drive in an external enclosure and hook it up. Then hope that you can recover data etc.
3. Wait until you go home, hook the PowerBook up to another Mac using Target Disk Mode and a Firewire cable (assuming you have another Mac) and then see if you can recover data.

If you do have backups, then the solutions are the same, minus trying to recover data but instead just restoring it from backup.

[imitchellg5]

I would also recommend not using your PowerBook until you can try one of the solutions. Starting it up more can just dig the hard drive further down the hole...