my laptop is overstuffed and had been acting slow but you know, stupidly you don't do anything about it other than making mental notes to back things up and clear it out. just keep rolling. in particular i have noticed that iphoto takes a chunk out of my resources so i try to quit as many programs as possible before i launch iphoto. so there i was today, playing some music on itunes and printing out pictures in iphoto and it started to struggle. the audio was cutting in and out. the printing was stalling. then it stopped altogether. i thought it'd be alright if i force quit the program, cleared out the system by saving a bunch of stuff to an external hard drive, then tried again. well, the whole system was frozen. i couldn't force quit, i had to force shut down. when it started back up, i connected the external drive and tried to copy 1 file. it said it would take over 9 minutes when normally it wouldn't even take 1 minute. then i realized it was getting stuck again. alright, restart again. maybe this happened twice. i started it up and got the flashing questioning mark finder icon of death. oh shit! this is not good. i did all the usual things one would do in this situation. i tried to boot in target firewire mode. i got the firewire sign on the screen but the drive didn't show up on another mac. i couldn't boot in single user mode, i couldn't boot in safe mode, i couldn't boot in verbose mode. i put in the system disk and disc utility couldn't help (it couldn't repair and many times i couldn't select a startup disk because my hard drive just wasn't showing up! *gulp*) . i put in disk warrior which worked wonders before. disk warrior froze in the middle of repairing the disk. i am totally fucked. i have to take a deep breath, take a step back, talk to some mac gurus, and think about my options.