[iBook] interesting HD behaviour

[Angus Wallace]

Hey all,

I'm hoping the wisdom of the list can help me..

I've had a vew varied problems with my ibook that I think stem from my hard
disk.

Firstly, I was using fink a few months ago, and having some problems. I
discovered that some of the source files on my hard disk were corrupted.
Specifically, it appeared as though the 'bounds' of the files were incorrect
(i.e. the metadata describing file locations was wrong). I deleted all the
files, and reinstalled the developer tool which solved the problem.

Of late, I've been having problems where the system crashes. Well almost. I
might be listening to music in iTunes, and have some heavy load elsewhere (for
example compiling two things at once - something in fink, and something in
Matlab or Xtools), and the system will go unresponsive. It hasn't crashed,
because every 10 seconds, iTunes will play several seconds of music, and then
stop again). The only solution seems to be to force reboot:
(<ctrl><apple><power>).

I thought this might be a problem with paging (but I have 640mb ram, so I
wouldn't think so, but then.. Matlab ;-)

I've looked in the log files after some of these crashes, and while the
information isn't detailed, it seems to suggest a problem with the HD.

I went into the disk utility yesterday, and it did the big system crash (many
languages saying reboot, dark screen, etc.

I booted the Panther install cd, and went into the disk repair program - it said
there were errors on the disk that it was unable to fix..

I'm running 10.3.5 (all updates as of last week).

What's the consensus - does this sound like a hardware problem? I realise that
this is quite a detailed question for this list. Can people suggest things to
try?

Thanks a lot,
-Angus

ps. I've backed up all my important data ;-)