Powerbook suddenly very slow and Indexing

Question

Yesterday my G4 1.67Ghz Powerbook 2GB RAM suddenly slowed down and got the beachball thingy.
I shut down
This morning i restarted and it is extreemly slow (like 4 or 5 mins to boot) and really slow in OS X. I noticed Spotlight is indexing but it seems stuck on estimating indexing time.
After another couple of restarts the PB started turning itself off whilst on the grey screen with the apple logo at boot.
Now its booting again but slowly and OS X is slow again and its indexing.
I tried the following:
Reset NVRAM and PRAM
Reset PMU
Disk repair from install CD but it stopped and said cannot repair disk. Thats when the mac was able to boot again but as i said above very slowly.
Trying boot cd's is a bit of a pain since the superdrive works 20% of the time.
Any ideas what could be wrong or what else i can try ?
Im running Leopard 10.5.8

Answer 1

Disk repair from install CD but it stopped and said cannot repair disk. Thats when the mac was able to boot again but as i said above very slowly.
What you're describing sounds like a hard drive going bad, and the fact that Disk Utility reports it can't repair the disk would confirm this. You have a couple of options. Depending on what the error is that Disk Utility can't repair, a program like Disk Warrior or TechTool Pro may be able to repair it.  However, some errors can't be repaired, and a new hard drive may be in order (and is probably cheaper than Disk Warrior). You could try doing a security erase writing zero's to the disk, then restore your data, however, if the issue is a hard drive hardware issue, that won't fix it.
You can also download SMART Utility from http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php to see what the SMART sensors say about the health of your disk.