[HusserlInSpace]

Hello, I'm new to this forum and I would like to post a question to the community about problems I'm experiencing with Disk Utility. I'm on an old fabulous iBook G4 with OS X 10.4.11. I've searched this (and other forums) for two days now and I haven't found any direct match, thus my post - hope I haven't missed out on issues already dealt with too recently.

My problem is that I can't repair my disk with Disk Utility: whenever I try, the beachball starts spinning and I'm stuck with that view, can't shift to another open application, can't forcequit either but it is still not a deadlock hang, theoretically speaking. I thought it might be lack of patience on my side, so I left it working for a whole night but no progress had been made. I've tried this a number of times. I have to unplug and open the batterycase in order to cut the power, then restart (don't feel too good about that I can tell you) in order to go on working.

Why do I want to run Disk Repair? Because my system has become excessively sluggish the past month, it takes half a minute to save an ordinary Word-file, to move back and forth between applications (Word-mail-Safari-Firefox). I'm fast with updates so that shouldn't be the problem. Although I'm reluctant to install external applications, I sort of half suspect two fairly recent apps that I couldn't refrain from installing: Senuti and MacFlac (for audiofiles), but I don't know that much about them.

thank u fr lettin m b mice elf again

[seanc]

If it's hanging on a Disk Repair and you're experiencing sluggish performance it sounds like you're having a hard drive failure.

Make sure you have a recent backup.

Check the SMART status of your hard drive in Disk Utility, is it Verified or Failing? Also, how much RAM do you have? How much free disk space do you have?

[HusserlInSpace]

Thanks for your suggestions. Doesn't sound too good then according to your judgement. The smart status says "controlled" (in Swedish), i.e. "verified" (not "failing"). I have just over 2 GB free disk space (out of 28), so that should be ok I assume. I have 256 + 512 MB of ram which has been ok but not really sufficient. (Normally I mainly use Word documents, when they get fairly large, say over 1000 pages of text, saving has always been real slow, even if I'm only running Word with one document open.) I'll try to run the Disk Repair from my dvd tonight.

[OreoCookie]

2 GB of free harddrive space is not enough, especially if you have so little RAM. It sounds to me that you need to replace the harddrive anyway, so you can address at least one of the issues.

[jmiddel]

Memory for your iBook is about $35 for one Gig, this would speed you up a lot. And of course OreoCookie is totally right, your HD is not giving Word any space to move things around when saving docs, 1,000 pages is not an insignificant amount of data! The price of HDs is really low, so don't skimp on size, an 80G is about $49 at www.newegg.com

Find the memory at http://www.ramseeker.com/ Good luck, those iBooks are real troopers.

[HusserlInSpace]

Yes of course, that's always a nice solution to just get a new hard drive and some new memory, instead of getting a new machine. I probably would if I still could use my firewire interface (to make secondary backups to an old iMac dvd; I can still backup to my external la cie rugged 250 gb with double usb, but I like to have duplicates. Yes, the iBook has been fantastic, dragged along on my shoulder throughout Europe, on boats in the Swedish archipelago, Moroccan buses, all over India for months, in heat and snow, with such a strong "will" to just ... function. But I suppose it won't last forever.

Now I've tried the Disk Repair from the dvd: it worked just fine and my hd is now repaired. After this I ran Disk Repair from the system on the hd and that also worked now (!). As it seems that I'm back in the tracks, for now: thank you all who helped me out! I've also been cleaning and now I have over 5 gb of free disk space, maybe that'll keep me going thru the winter...
/Nicholas