Wow. My iBook appears hosed. Again.

Last night things slowed to a crawl. So slow, that other than my mouse, everything was basically unresponsive. The load average was sitting in a decent .50. Because I couldn't get any Finder menus to respond, I power cycled it. After about 10 attempts to power it on, it finally powered on. Only, I couldn't log in as my account. It would just sit there spinning. After a few attempts at this, I remembered that I had set the root password as an emergency measure, and was able to log in to this account. Things were still going slow as hell. I did a dmesg only to find dozens of I/O errors on my Laptop's hard disk. Shit. That's never good.

I was able to limp along to set up Firewire networking between my Mac and PC so I could copy all my important files over, and I'm going to try to do a clean OS install tonight. I don't anticipate it helping things any since I/O errors usually indicate hardware failure, but it may be enough to limp along so I can take my laptop with me on vacation.

If it doesn't help, I have two options: take it to the Apple Store and hope this is something they can fix in-house (it's a laptop, so not bloody likely), or use my iPod as a temporary hard disk for my Mac just to hold me over until I get back from vacation.

Either way, it's a sucky situation. :(

I swear, our luck with iBooks have been just the worst. That makes two failed logic boards, two failed combo drives, two bad Airport cards, and now one potentially borked hard drive. Oh, and the battery that just doesn't seem to seat right (but it seems to be an extremely common flaw on the white iBooks).