File System Errors - What is the root cause?

My wife's iBook G4 about once every two weeks, will not shut down and just displays what she calls "the wheel of death". If we hold the power button down it'll turn off, OR if we wait about 15 minutes it will turn off. Upon powering back on, it will not boot, it will continue to give the "wheel of death".

If I boot to the unix command prompt and execute 'fdisk -fy' it will find the following:

1) 4 or 5 "unknown file types" and it clears them
2) Unallocated I=####### owner of root, and it removes them.
3) Free BLK count(s) wrong in superblk
4) Summary Information Bad, Salvage, yes.

We do this game quite of then. Is her hard drive beginning to fail? She uses the suspend feature a lot, several times a day. Is this killing it?

Thanks for any tips on this.

I'm assuming you mean fsck, not fdisk (unless something changed in Leopard).
You need to run it several times until it stops coming up with errors.
If it continues to show errors, you just might be looking at a bad drive.
I don't think suspend (sleep) will cause it but I might be wrong as I don't use it.

cradom said:

I'm assuming you mean fsck, not fdisk (unless something changed in Leopard).
You need to run it several times until it stops coming up with errors.
If it continues to show errors, you just might be looking at a bad drive.
I don't think suspend (sleep) will cause it but I might be wrong as I don't use it.

Click to expand...

Sorry, yes I meant to say FSCK, not FDISK. I should run the fsck -fy continuously, and not just each time when it happens?

Thanks for the tip.

Run it 4 or 5 times in a row and see if it still shows errors.
If you can get a copy, you might also try Diskwarrior.
(preferably from a boot disk, they have one)