[X4U] iPhoto Problem

[Chris Malanga]

Hello... a friend of mine is having trouble with iPhoto, both the old version and iLife 5 version.  His message is below... do you have any suggestions for him?
 
 Thanks!
 
 Chris
 
 HIS MESSAGE: 
 
 Hey, how's it going?  I have Tiger up and running.  I like it so  
 far.  However, I am having a problem with iPhoto.  I know you told me  
 to make a backup before I installed tiger.  Well, I was going to back  
 up my photos, but when I went into iPhoto it said, "loading photos"  
 with a spinning cursor for about half an hour.  I never got any of my  
 pictures to show up at all.  Well, I thought I would just try to  
 install the new system and the new version of iPhoto (we bought iLife  
 5 at the same time as tiger).  I installed tiger on my new hard drive  
 as a clean install.  I ran software update, then installed iLife.  
 When i launched iPhoto it said it had to update my photo library.  It  
 went all through that and then I got the same "loading photos"  
 message again.  I let it sit for another half hour with no luck.  I  
 started thinking there was something wrong with my panther disk.  I  
 ran disk utility and verified the disk.    The first partition (with  
 os9 on it) checked out fine, but then I got a message that the other  
 partition (with panther) failed because it couldn't be unmounted.  I  
 tried repairing permissions, and it fixed a few things, but I could  
 never get the disk verified.  If I go into the pictures folder on the  
 panther volume the pictures are there, but i can't get them to show  
 up in iPhoto.  I would even be happy if i could create a whole new  
 library in iPhoto, but all I get is the wait cursor.  Do you have any  
 suggestions?  I have all my pictures on my ipod if I need to restore  
 them, but I was hoping I could fix the library if it was corrupt.   
 Let me know if there is any hope for me.