[X4U] Booting error weirdness

[Steve Talkowski]

I seem to always experience the weirdest OS X problems.  Here's the 
current situation:

Last week I needed to fax some information and remember reading a blurb 
about using OS X's built-in faxing capabilities, so I thought I'd give 
it a test run.   On my 15" 1.5GHz Powerbook I opened System Prefs and 
proceeded to click on the Faxing tab to enable it.    Suddenly, I get 
the spinning cursor.  After a few moments I decide to force a reboot 
and it hangs during the initializing services stage - it won't get past 
initializing network settings.  I unplug the ethernet cable and try 
again - this time it hangs during "Starting Shake Qmaster services".   
Grrrr.  I pop in the system disk, verifying and repairing permissions 
numerous times and still it won't boot.

I performed a fresh OS X install about 2 months ago and everything has 
been fine since this latest episode.

I next tried to boot up using Diskwarrior, but my disc (which was 
created/upgraded 2 months ago using the then electronic upgrade to v 
3.0.2) would not boot the Powerbook, instead causing a "you must 
restart your system" gray screen warning.   The strange thing is, I was 
able to use this newly created disc to boot my Sawtooth G4 when I was 
having problems with that machine a few months ago.  I've since ordered 
the CD revision 36 update, but won't be able to put it to the test 
until it arrives, which could take 3-4 weeks.  (The upgrade costs 
around $50, and I didn't want to take a chance buying a store version 
not knowing if that version would contain an OSX 10.3 compliant 
version)

In the meantime, I don't  have that much critical data on the 
Powerbook, but I do have a few things I haven't backed up that I'd like 
not to lose.  So then I thought, "hmm, I wonder if I can boot up with 
firewire target mode?"   It worked, and I was able to mount my 
Powerbook, retrieve and backup the current work on it.

I guess my question is - does this sound like a permissions problem?  
I'm hoping that Diskwarrior will be able to rebuild the directories and 
do it's magic so that  I won't have to wipe the drive and start over 
from scratch (though, that will be much easier to do now that I was 
able to mount and save my data).  Everything looks normal when I view 
the contents of the Powerbook hard drive while mounted in firewire 
target mode.

Thanks for any thoughts, observations, or suggestions.

-Steve