Sick Computer

My poor little computer is sick.

I noticed it a few days ago - it was "sleeping" and when I moved the mouse, or pressed a key, nothing happened.

Yesterday, it froze on me a few times - something it had never done since I got it in July.

Uh oh. Time to break out Norton Disk Doctor.

Here's where it really became interesting.....

When I launched Norton Disk doctor, it didn't see my hard drive, so I didn't have the option of selecting my hard drive to be examined. Weird!

I also tried to run the first aid disk doctor program that came with my computer. It only allowed me to view the permission settings, but again, wouldn't allow me to select my hard drive for repair. Big uh-oh!

Finally, I broke out the Norton CD and ran it as my start up disk.
This time it did recognize my hard drive, and I was able to examine it!

I've been working on this since last night, and started running it again this morning.

Bad News: all kinds of kooky things are happening - things I've never seen on Norton before. It's finding several "major errors" in the "directories" section, and does allow me to fix them. However, I'm having some real problems. Every few errors, it might freeze, say it needs to be restarted, or simply quit out of the application.

Good News: every time this happens, and I need to restart my computer, or relaunch the application, it gets further along.

this could very well take all day.

I will call Apple Care later on, but I want to run it through Norton first.

Eek. Hope my little computer can pull through.... I need to get some work done.

And yes, like all good techie-geeks, I have backed-up my files ;)

UPDATE

1:40pm: still working on it.

I remembered (about an hour ago) that my Apple Care program came with a CD that would have some sort of other diagnostic program on it. Indeed it does. We put that in, and it crashed when it was reading through the RAM. This was an "a-ha" moment.

My computer came with 512MB RAM, though it was in two separate 256MB slots. I bought an extra half GB RAM when I ordered the computer. We replaced one of the original 256MB RAM slots with the new 512MB RAM.

We just tried taking out the 512MB RAM, and re-running the TechTool Deluxe program. So far, so good.....

Another UPDATE 4:46pm

Still going.....

It may have been RAM problems, but there's also something else going on.....

As we were running the TechTool Deluxe program, we encountered errors with the volume.... It's running the repair now, but it's taking a very long time :(

at this rate, it still has another couple hours to go.

:(