Emergency-G4 17" PB Desktop won't mount

[Willster2]

Hi,

Not trying to overstate urgency above anyone else - just in the middle of a project with tight deadline, and this has happened at the worst possible moment!!

Mac G4 17" (purchased in December 05) started making funny noises in the Superdrive when trying to play a DVD made with iDVD 05. Have Mac Tiger OSX 10.4.3 or 4 (can't remember and can't check) - then froze. A couple of disks burned from the same project started freezing, then playing every couple of seconds, (or would play normally an hour before and then start acting up a few hours later when re-mounted) and had noticed subtle "pulsing" and a bit of digital artifacting in an iMovie project saved as a Quicktime .mov upon playback. Thought the DVD disks in question might be faulty, but they play fine with no jitter in a separate DVD player. (The iMovie 05 menu theme Drop Zone frames played back kind of jittery during construction of the project, but were ok upon DVD disk playback in an external player).

Had also been getting frequent crashes when building another component of the project in iMovie 05.

Upon restart, the Powerbook asks for my log-in, and then mounts generic blue screen background (design looks Windows'ish) with no other icons on screen - can't click on anything.

Have tried all the restarts (PRAM, PMU, Safe, Single-User/fsck) to no avail.
Also get an ominous tone when pressing the power button before the mac "chord" finally kicks in.

Have tried Disk Utility/Repair Permissions/ and get the following error message on Repair Disk:
"Checking catalog file.
Incorrect size for file ABLabelMetrics.plist
(It should be 0 instead of 755914244096)
Incorrect block count for file info.plist
(It should be 1310721 instead of 1)
INVALID FILE RECORD LENGTH
VOLUME CHECK FAILED
ERROR: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error

And Disk Repair quits right there.

As per advice in other threads I checked here, tried running Disk Repair a number of times, and always get same message. Same message comes up in Single-User mode when the progress bar is about an eighth of the way through the process.

Disk utility shows the files exist (listed under the Hard Disk Icon) here are the stats:
118.8 GB ST9120821A
Macintosh HD - MAC OS Extended Journaled
4.2 GB MATSHITADVD
2GB Ram

Capacity: 111.7GB (119,899,868,160 Bytes)
Available: 65.8 GB (70,655,366,448 Bytes)
Used: 45.9 GB (49,244,528,640 Bytes)
Number of files: 374,266

So the questions are:

1.Anyone familiar with this problem that can offer a workaround/solution or anything I haven't tried?

2. Is there any way of getting at the ABLabelMetrics.plist to correct it ?

2. Is there a way of doing a selective re-install or restore that won't eliminate the existing files on the hard disk. I've got back-up DVD's of most of the project files - my concern would be losing some Photoshop files and other newer .jpg's that hadn't been backed-up yet.

3. Or will I just have to bite the bullet and do a complete re-install and try to build the project back from files imbedded on the completed iMovie DVD?

Your kind suggestions are desperately sought, and very gratefully appreciated. Especially for those of us who are on squeezed budgets with no room for downtime because of faulty hardware/software.

With sincere thanks in advance,

Will

[pipermalibu]

You can reinstall and keep all your settings, programs, etc.- however, I would advise starting in target disk mode to another mac if at all possible and get everything from the user account to another hard disk, just in case

[bobw]

The underlying task reported failure on exit

This isn't a good sign.

You could try DiskWarrior and see if that will repair it;

http://www.alsoft.com

Otherwise you'll need to reformat and then run Disk Utility and see if the problem is corrected.

It could be a bad hard drive that nothing will fix.