System stalling and launching difficuilties

Question

Last week my iBook G4 passed away, literally notting would work, was taking half an hour and over to restart and was not opening any programmes. I manged to verify/restore permissions from disk utility and through Onyx deleting all caches and temporary files (figured that it might be the last firefox upgrade so deleted firefox and VLC player just incase), and nothing changed! Than after two days of being neglected and rest it is now working reletively fine. The problem is that it is getting stuck at random points like playing iTunes it stops in the middle of the song and the colour wheel rotates, same happening when using safari & firefox.
Does anyone know what I can do to fix this. I thought I might have 2much music in iTunes and some how that was making it stall - so I have deleted a big chunck of my music library as well. Help!! all suggestions wellcome.
aisha
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)   640 MB DDR, 933mhz
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.3.9)  

Answer 1

Aisha:
I was going to go with Carbon Copy Clone, but SD look better.
SuperDuper is not only easier to use, it actually is better.
Disk Warrior looks a little out of my league, though I would like to solve/repair if possible without buying a new harddrive.
Disk Warrior is, actually, quite easy to use, and it is something that you can use for regular maintenance. I use mine at least once a month, sometimes more often. It is well worth the expense and can save you money in the long run.
If someone can explain how this third party programme would actually work on a dead compter in simple english, that would be more helpful.
If your computer is able to boot from a CD, you will be able to boot from DW. I have mine installed on my external Firewire HDD, and when I want to run it I boot from one of the partitions on my external HDD and run it from there on the PBook. So you have two options in that regard. What it does, is that examines your formatted volume on your HDD, it repairs and rebuilds the directory, and then replaces it, at your command.
Ok, what I plan to do is Traget Mode my iBook to a Power Book and have LaCie HardDrive attachted to it. Copy/Clone my Harddrive to the LaCie. Do you think this would work?
I see no reason why it shouldn't work. If you run into difficulty, post back and someone will help you out.
plus does it make a difference if the LaCie drive is USB or Firewire.
Yes, it does. While you can backup to a USB HDD, you will not be able to boot from it. If you want to make a bootable clone, it has to be a Firewire drive. The value of that is that you can boot from the external HDD and clone back to the internal HDD, if needed, or even run your computer from the external Firewire HDD.
Good luck.
cornelius