DiskWarrior

Like others said Allsoft's DiskWarrior IMHO is the best program to repair a system sick Mac. That program has saved my butt more times that I care to mention. ...

I am assuming you have verified/repaired permissions. What is the S.M.A.R.T status of you hard drive (Applications/Utilities/Disc Utility)? If it is OK, you could try some repair software: DiskWarrior - $100 TechTool Pro - $100 Cocktail - $15 Applejack - Free

for a backup to and external (or second disk): Super Duper. Bootable DVD is not easy. For the best repair tool (that is bootable) on a Mac IMHO is DiskWarrior. This utility saved my butt more often than I care to count.

Could be a problem with the hard drive - possibly a directory error? I remember getting a similar message during an update on a PPC MacMini a while back. I ran Diskwarrior, checked permissions and rebuilt the directory. After that everything was fine. Mac Pro 2.66 4 Gb RAM

If you boot to your installer DVD, you will find that you can open Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. If your hard drive shows up there, you can try the Repair Disk button. If the hard drive does not show up, then the drive may not be recoverable (no data can be retrieved). This situation is a good time to try DiskWarrior, which sometimes works miracles, or simply proves...

This issue is has been kicking me for a long time and I'm about ready to toss this system out the window. :) I have a Rev A iMac (tray loading) G3 system that worked perfectly fine, until I went to replace the 6GB internal drive with a 60GB, and increase the RAM to 256MB, memory approved for upgrading on the iMac G3. My goal was to install Panther on it, install KidPix and...

If Disk Utility can't repair it, you need a good one. IMHO, DiskWarrior is the best, then TechTool Pro. ...

About the fsck question. OS X has Disk Utility, which is a GUI for fsck. A more powerful utility, DiskWarrior, reports problems it cannot repair. So, fsck really is a moot point here. Back up while you can, reformat, and restore to the hard drive, if it is working OK then. Otherwise, replace the HD.

My intel core duo 20" iMac has an internal 500GB drive. Currently it is split into 4 partitions. I want to keep the main system drive, and then join the other 3 together to make 1 big data drive. I have erased the 2 smaller partitions and now only have data in the system drive and the existing data drive. I have all the disk tools you can think of installed (Diskwarrior,...

'... I was misunderstanding what booting with the Target key means. I thought it would try to boot from a Firewire "disk" conneted on the Firewire port.' - press and keep pressed the '' key during the boot process. All possible 'boot' volumes (installed internally or connected eternally) will be listed. Once 45+ seconds pass and the cursor changes to an 'arrow', click...