update gone wrong? missing my dock/applications folder + finder crashes

Hi,

I have a late 08 aluminum macbook and I recently took it to the genius bar because it wasn't loading past the grey apple screen.

The guy reinstalled mac os x and it worked just fine, however I was missing applications like iPhoto and GarageBand so I downloaded them using the cd that came with my computer.

I did an update and after restarting, my dock is gone and I can't open the applications folder and finder doesn't respond at all. I get the spinning wheel of death.

I did command+s while restarting and used the fsck -fy command but it said it couldn't repair my harddrive after 3 attempts. What's going on?

thanks
x

Take it back to the Apple store and have them look at it again. It appears that you have a bad hard drive. It seems reinstalling OS X was only a band aid and not the cure.

Strange, they were able to fix it without wiping out my harddrive and ran a test on it. It's supposed to be working fine :/

It's apparently an intermittent problem. Did you get AppleCare? (It would still be good til late '11.)