... it looks like this message is a foretelling of imminent Hard Drive failure. At least according to this old macosxhints forum thread I dug up The HD had been making strange sounds, on and off, for over a month now. Strange that the apple hardware test didn't show any problems.
I back up fairly regularly to 2 different external HD's so I hopefully won't lose too much. I shall let the iBook cool down and see if I can get any other stuff off it before it totally crashes. Any advice on free or cheap back up utilites out there that I could use to capture the whole HD onto another external drive?
Also, until I crack my iBook to replace the HD... what is the best method for installing the OS to an external HD so I can use my iBook? If it involves using a properly functioning iBook to get started, then that is OK... since I can use my friends iBook to get started.
Thanks for any and all advice
grim
OK... so my little iBook ran fine part of the morning until I plugged in that darn thumbdrive I was messing with last night, and tried to drag a song to it from iTunes (for my friend) I got the spinning beach ball, and it wouldn't go away. I have rebooted several times using the on/off button and the same thing happens. Using the hardware test disc, everything comes up A-OK. Booted up in safe/single user mode and activated AppleJack disc utility. Starting on the first activity (Disc Repair) it got all the way down to ** Checking Catalog Hierarchy... and now I got a string of messages saying...
"IOATA Controller device blocking bus"
Disk0s3: I/O timeout.
Followed by Missing thread recovery (id=3417491)
Invalid directory item count
(it should be 0 instead of 1)
and then some more... "IOATA Controller device blocking bus"
What is going on?
Thanks for any advice.
grim
1.2 ghz G4 iBook
OS X 10.4.10

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