HELP thought fixed w/diskwarrior, won't start again

Question

A hardware check on my powerbook revealed bad memory. I took out the faulty memory card, and have rebuilt the directory with the good one intact using Diskwarrior. So it seems that I should be able to at least start up my computer with the one good memory card while I purchase another, but now during start-up it freezes on "Waiting for Printer Services". Does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

It won't hurt to try running DW again. But if you had bad memory in the Powerbook, it's entirely possible that more than just your hard disk directory has been damaged: you may have individual files that are damaged, too, and neither DW nor any other disk utility can fix files that have been damaged by partial overwriting, partial erasure, or having gobbledygook written to them, any of which can happen as a result of bad memory.
If DW continues to give you a clean bill of health but the computer still won't start up, the HD directory is OK, but you probably have damaged files that are essential to the boot process. In that case, it may be necessary to reinstall the OS. Since the directory is sound, an Archive and Install should be sufficient: no need to erase the disk first.
Note, however, that some of your own files could also have been damaged. You won't find out about that until you try to open a damaged file, and it doesn't. I hope you had backed all important data up before the bad-memory problem appeared.