f1

If I typed 'You FSCK' on chat, what would you think it meant?
Well, if you type it in shell you get a Filesystem Check. You may need to do one if you ever drop your laptop. Maybe it started right back up, after it shut down from the shock of the fall. But eventually, you may experience what I went through today.
Problem, computer starts to boot, thinks about booting, then shuts down and starts over. It will do this for hours. Trust me. Safe boot doesn't work, verbose boot doesn't shed light on my day, so we are on to the savior, our install CD.
Boot on CD, launch Disk Utilities, Verify disk and FAIL...during the Catalog check. Earlier today, I wasn't that worried. I'd run through some other diagnostics and correct the problem. But now, later in the day, after much trial and error, I have a deeper knowledge. FSCK. It looks like a short form of the f word and suck. And that is what I was saying the whole time I was using it. But I digress.
fsck on its own doesn't do much, but with a couple options, f, l, p, and r you can do some work. NOTE: not enough to fix my harddrive, but enough to know what is wrong with it. r is to rebuild the catalog. It didn't work for me, because my drive is Dirty. Still don't know what a Dirty Filesystem is, but hope to gain that info some day. p performs a preening of the system. Capital P does this for only clean drives. q runs a test and corrects some things. I liked running q, but really can't tell you what it was doing. f runs a check on the specified system. Not very indepth and failed for me each time it tried to verify the catalog. You can find more about fsck here ... http://docs.hp.com/en/B2355-60127/fsck_hfs.1M.html
And many other places on the web. As I was eager to find.
NOTE: if you are running an HFS+ system you won't be able to use fsck. You will have to use fsck_hfs. Everything else stays the same. You will know when you start getting Super Bad errors.
Bad Super Blocks, or something like that.
Just wanted to jot some of this down. It took quite a nice chunk of my day and I wouldn't want it to go unnoticed. In the end, I took a os 10.3 drive from an older laptop, but it in my wife's and was done. Still have the bad drive and hope to someday figure out how to rebuild the catalog.
Oh, I forgot to mention about the ribbon connector for the top of the laptop. When you replace the harddrive, the keyboard plate needs to be removed. When you do this, a hidden ribbon connection gets disconnected. But it is not at all obvious how it goes back. You will stare at it for a while, and even get close, but the answer is elusive. Aw, I'll just tall ya, the ribbon slips through a hole in the middle of the case. You need to flip over the laptop and remove one of the memory slots to see the other side of the hole. Pull the ribbon through, unlock the receptor, slide in ribbon and resecure lock. Put back memory card and continue assembly. That little nugget made my eyes spin.