No connection to HD

[DanaSan]

Hi! I found your website while looking for information on troubleshooting my Mac. I hope you can help.

I am having problems with my Macbook OS X. I am in Japan and dealing with MacSupport is a bit complicated with the language barrier and all. I am hoping there is a simple solution that I am too computer-illiterate to know.

Basically, I can`t seem to connect to the hard drive. I don`t know what happened. Yesterday I just booted up my computer as normal and it came up fine, but the internet connection was really sluggish, so I rebooted. Thats when I lost the connection entirely.

I did all the troubleshooting in the manual...

1. The hardware check detected no errors.

2. I used the Disk Utility: First Aid option on the Mac OS X Install disk to check for errors. What I got was the following...

Verifying volume Macintosh HD
Invalid node stucture
1 HFS volume checked
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.

3. I tried to repair it, but it failed:

1 HFS volume checked
volume could not be repaired because of error.

4. The error that kept flashing was Error: the underlying text reported failure on exit.

5. I also tried to re-install the software with the Mac OS Install Disks, but that failed as well.

That is all I have. If you can help, I would appreciate it. Thanks!