HELP! I have a big problem...

[edX]

warning - use norton utilities at your own risk. you will find much better repair and maintanence applications in techtool pro from www.micromat.com or diskwarrior/plus optimizer from www.alsoft.com

both of these programs do much better repairs, do a safer defragmentation and i believe they cost less than norton as well. my own reccomendation is the diskwarrior and plus optimizer combination if you only get one. it has a well earned application for fixing things other repair apps don't. i can personally attest that it saved my external drive when ttp and norton couldn't.

[genghiscohen]

Amen to that, Ed! DiskWarrior/PlusOptimizer is the essential repair utility.
And an OS X-native version is scheduled to be released in 6 to 8 weeks!

[John Philip]

Almost all producers of computers - be it PC's or Mac's use the same system to put the basic software on their machinery.
Explained short and simplified:
Instead of 'basic formatting' the wonderful HD's' and THEN install whatever. They do both at once.
i.e. They have a 'rack' where they mount a multitude of the HD's out of the box and a 'sector formatting' takes place - but with each sector on the drive the software is copied along. This is done in large series of HD's at once.
This results sometimes - more often than not in a 'Shaky' Drive' and a faulty computer.
The fix is to do a formatting first yourself and then install the software that usually accompanies the computer on CD's.
Working for a large reseller here (DK), I have experienced this often. Most lately this spring, when I had the 'mixed' pleasure of changing a customers computers to new G4 quicksilvers.
Thinking I might 'feel a lucky punk', me and my collegue installed 200+ G4's without formatting. Almost all of which had to be reformatted and reinstalled again within a month from the initial setup. This reformatting and reinstallation cleared about 99% of the (frequent) problems the customer had with the G4's.
I have previously been with a PC distributor, where we 'preloaded' software for our resellers in the above manner. Because of the problems I have been referring to, we changed the 'production' of preloads to first format, then install.
Again this solved a lot of problems.
So if you have a fairly new Mac/pc, that acts up - try this..
PS: If it still acts up after this - have it warranty checked at an aut. reseller - there might be something 'really' wrong with the GD thing.