[DanielPritchard]

I've had my PowerBook 12" for almost 90 days.

Just last week or so, iTunes has started displaying an error message when I sync my iPod something like this:
Some of the songs, including "Title of Song," have not been copied to your iPod because they could not be found.
[ ] Don't show me this message again.
( OK )

Then, I go hunt down "Title of Song" in the iTunes library and sure enough, it has an exclamation point by it (gee, reminds me of the Windows device manager). When I double-click the song,
The song "Title of Song" could not be used because the original file could not be found. Would you like to locate it?
( Cancel ) ( Yes )

When I press "Yes," it puts up an Open dialog, I can then navigate through the iTunes folder, find the song and select it, and then boom, the song is fixed, and then no more problems. The only problem is more songs pop up like this the next time I sync.

Plus, my startup times are 8-10 minutes sometimes now (inconsistently) and from what I can tell when holding Cmd-V on startup is that the disk needs to be scanned and repaired, � la Disk Utility or Disk First Aid.

So of course DU won't do it, because it's the startup disk. DU recommends booting from the OS X CD. I do have an OS X CD set, and I tried holding down "C" but I'm pretty sure it didn't boot from the CD. The CD did mount after startup and it has nothing useful on it but a Classic Disk First Aid, which just gave me an error message (I forgot which now) and refused to do anything.

My questions are:
1. How do I verify and repair my hard disk for good?! I did run fsck -y in single user mode. Every time it doesn't seem to actually fix much of anything. Here's the other thing. It always does this:
File count is wrong, should be 123456 instead of 123457
Resetting file count
File count is wrong, should be 123457 instead of 123456
Resetting file count
The numbers are made up here, but they're in that general range and one unit apart. What's going on here? FSCK can't figure out how many files there are or what?
That occurs every time I run fsck, although I'm sure the numbers change each time as I add and remove files on the hard disk.

2. How do I enable the journaled file system? From what I've heard, I think this would prevent me from getting so many disk errors of this kind.

[coolmacdude]

Well fsck and disk utility's repair mode are the same thing so if that didn't fix it, you may need to get a third party app like Diskwarrior, Drive 10, or Norton.

[LfGrdMike]

Try doing a resinstall of OSX that might do the ticket. Also what are the specs of your 12 like HD size im getting at. Oh just thought of another question does your drive display the correct amount of free space?

[Uday's Carcass]

you shouldn't enable journaling until your drive is error-free. when that's done, a utility called cocktail gives you a simple GUI for many things, one of which is enabling/disabling journaling.

[DanielPritchard]

But... what's this "boot from install cd and run something from there" process? How do I do that? And what does it look like when you boot from the Jaguar CD? I'd like to try that.

As far as an OS reinstall, I'd like to save that for last resort. It really won't be much fun, and plus I'll have to run the 10.2.6 updater again. Took forever last time. Kind of like the forever this thing is taking to boot.

-Dan

[Karim]

Put the install DVD that came with your computer in your drive and shutdown. Then startup again holding down the 'c' key. You will boot off the DVD and then you can run disk utillity.

If it reports errors and fixes them you may be good to go.

If it reports errors and says it can't fix all of them then your best bet is a program called Disk Warrior that can reconstruct a directory and fix you files gone missing problem.

[tooki]

DO NOT install OS X if there is known corruption on the disk! You're liable to make things worse.

Get DiskWarrior and use it.

tooki