G4 Can't repair disc

My G4 is running very slow, so I went to repair the disc with first aid and it would complete because of an error "incorrect block count for file appletalk (it should be 7 instead of 5)". When I called Apple they told me that I couldn't delete Appletalk, so I would need to either reformat or get a new hard drive. I wanted to know if anyone had another suggestion before I went thru all that. Thanks^_^

Yes, run disk utility from your install disc, repair permissions and repair disk. That really should fix anything like this. If not using the fsck command in single user mode probably will, but try the first step first.

G'day princess and welcome to the forums.

To explain a little further Kevriano's suggestion, pop in your install DVD, reboot and immediately hold down 'C' until the machine is running from the disc. Go to Utilities in the menu bar and select Disk Utility , and hit the 'Repair Disk' button there. You cannot repair a disk you are running from.

Then reboot, go to Utilities, and there select Disk Utility and run Repair Permissions twice. If the machine is still so slow, try software Utility such as Onyx to clean caches, run maintenance scripts etc.

If there is still no joy maybe the drive is dying on you, particularly if boot times are extremely slow.