On 07-Apr-2005 09:02, Francis Vaughan wrote:
On 07/04/2005, at 5:09 PM, Adrian Delso wrote:
The kernel panics, spontaneous resets and the bloodt beachball are not good signs.
You are not wrong. The bottom line is that these have all the symptoms of a failing disk.
That would be my guess. Applications and files don't just disappear by themselves, but dying hard drives can easily "disappear" them. I had a drive on my work machine go donw a month or so back that exhibited the "disappearing stuff" along with "random crashes" symptoms before it finally kicked it utterly.
However I would be looking to get your valuable data off the disk ASAP. As the disk degrades it will get worse and worse.
Definitely.
I don't know if a 3rd party disc util like DiskWarrior would help stave off the inevitable or help find missing things, but it might. My old G3 laptop has a slightly cooked HD and in its last days of active service whilst I awaited the iBook, it would often "lose" whole directories (like the user Libraries!) until I recovered them with DiskWarrior. Mind you, I have heard a disk util like that could theoretically be the final straw that killed the disc right there and then, too. Your mileage may vary.
Cheers, Carl