Finder cannot be found

[jackamabie]

I'm having trouble with my ibook, OS X. When i was running it earlier, the fan starting slowing down, I'm assuming at least, and you could hear it louder than before. Then the computer froze, so I shut it down. I tried restarting in safe mode but it didn't reach the login screen but stopped on a blank screen with the folder in the middle saying Finder cannot be found. I am not able to get any further than this and the only thing i have been able to do is press the power button. What can I do to fix this problem? And is there a possibility that my hardrive is wiped?

Thanks for any help.

 

[billbaloney]

The first thing to try is booting into "single user mode" and running the command-line disk utility called fsck (pronounced "fisk").

There are detailed instructions many places on this site, including here.

If you're having physical problems with your drive, fsck will tell you there's a problem.

Have you tried booting from your OS CD that came with your iBook? If you can boot from that (put the CD in and hold down the "C" key at startup), you can try to run Apple's Disk Utility. Most users consider this program a little easier to use than fsck.