[X4U] 10.4.7 upgrade problem

[eleventhvolume]

Dear All,

I always, always backup before installing a system update. This time I
didn't, I'm not even sure why, just a moment of stupidity I guess. Anyway,
having upgraded to 10.4.7 I left off rebooting for a day or so to allow me
to do some work and when I did restart I encountered a lot of code and my
MacBook Pro wouldn't go any further. I typed reboot and depressed Apple/S to
enter single user mode to do fsck (the extent of my knowledge I'm sorry to
say and probably mistaken at that), but didn't succeed so did reboot again
and managed to get back into the normal OS. I repaired file permissions via
disk utility until there was nothing being repaired and rebooted a second
time. This time I got straight to my desktop.

However, my machine then appeared to be running hotter than usual - causing
the fan to kick in when previously it didn't - despite my only running
Firefox, Entourage, iTunes, Firefox and SpamSieve. MenuMeters appears to
indicate an increased system load so I thought I'd see what was causing this
by looking at Activity Monitor. Unfortunately, that application - which was
working fine before I upgraded - now fails to display any information at all
for Disk Activity, Network or System Memory. I've tried all the variations
of the pulldown menu including All Processes without success. The
independent CPU Monitor window does work and reflects the menubar MenuMeters
display.

I've rebooted again and now Disk Utility is displaying 'diskos1' alongside
my normal Macintosh HD. Diskos1 is apparently not mounted, has a partition
type of EFI and a capacity of 200mb. No other information's displayed.

Any suggestions about what, if anything, I should do now would be most
welcome. I took two shots of the code which can be viewed here:
http://www.eleventhvolume.com/P1070430a.jpg
http://www.eleventhvolume.com/P1070431a.jpg

All the best, Colin.