Constant crashing - 'Total system failure'

Question

Hey, if anyone could help me with this problem I seem to have I'd be really grateful, I don't know much about what's going on.
Basically, yesterday for no obvious reason a few apps started crashing on my iMac G4 running 10.4.9. Not being too technically gifted I used the solution to most of my problems, restarting the computer. Almost as soon as it started up though, it froze, so I had to restart again. This time safari refused to stay open for more than 5 minutes and msn messenger just bounced once in the dock and then stopped. I haven't installed anything dodgy recently, and the last thing that I got from apple was the 2007-004 security update.
So I ran the apple disc utility, and got it to fix some user permissions, but when it came to the 'verify disc' test, it didn't seem to happy. It said there was something wrong with the hard disc but it couldn't fix it. I got this message:
Verifying volume “Hard Disc”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Illegal name
Keys out of order
The volume The volume isc needs to be repaired.
*** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED ***
*** REBOOT NOW ***
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair
Unfortunately, have no idea what that means. Almost instantly after this though, some DOS-like black lines popped out from the left hand side of the screen, with white text full of numbers and computer jargon I didn't understand. As far as I could make out the kernel was involved It said something about a total system failure, and that it was waiting for a remote access code or something.
Anyway the point is, my computer is a tiny bit broken Doe anyone know if this is something ordinary that can be fixed with a few clicks of the mouse, or is there a virus involved? My initial thought was that it could have been the recent security update, but that was 4 days ago and this started last night.
Any help would be appreciated, thanks.
iMac G4   Mac OS X (10.4.9)  

Answer 1

Hi Ali_J;
May I welcome you to the Apple Discussion Forums.
First of all this is a virus.
Do you have a backup?
The error message "Keys out of order" indicates that you have some really serious problems which your disk. Do you have any idea as to exactly how full your disk is?
If you have run your free disk space very low this can cause this problem. If not, you might have a wonky disk. To repair this problem you are going to need a much more powerful tool then Disk Utility. DiskWarrior may be able to repair this problem. If it not able to fix the problem for you about the only alternative then is to reformat and reload.
Allan