right. today, i screwed my powermac. it now does all the things this ibook is doing. I noticerd the apple menu bar items (script, bluetooth, volume, time and spotlight) weren't responding (beachball). i went to activity monitor, and systemuiserver and loginwindow were not responding, as i thought they would be. knowing that force quitting login window would cause the computer to log me out, i force quite that too, as that was my only option by this point, as the system wouldn't let me restart.
i'm currently typing on the backup disk, running in the powermac. the volume is therefore fucked, by the sounds of things. the computer is fine, no apparent logic board problems, ram problams, or any hardware problems. however, this back up volume is far too old to use, and i really don't want to reinstall mac os. both options would take far too long.
i've tried fsck (macintosh HD appears to be ok), disk repair (twice, appears to be ok, but it fixed something the first time), permissions repair (nothing wrong).
I will now try PRAM and safe boot...
anything else? this is really urgent, obviously.... this is my livelihood!