A friend bought an iBook from Sears about two weeks ago and it worked great for a week, then it went very seriously SOUTH, like the HD would not mount, etc... DiskWarrior could not fix, no utility could fix it... nothing I knew or did could fix it.
I pride myself on troubleshooting Macs and can almost always fix a problematic Mac, I COULD NOT fix this one UNTIL he got MacOS 9 and I installed it for him last Saturday and that iBook is a VERY HAPPY iBook...
moral of the story? RUN, do NOT walk, and get MacOS 9 for your poor iBook.