Dead Hard-drive?

[Mussadique Suleiman]

Dear All,

Thanks for reading this e-mail,

I have a Powerbook G3 (Pismo) and I was running YDL 2.2 on it when one
day it would boot up saying that there were errors on the hard disk and
that I had to fsck it manually. So I did - after a whole day of
fsck-ing, the thing decided to boot up so I quickly got all the
important files out through FTP onto another workstation. 

Then, I proceeded to install YDL 2.3 (a chance to upgrade).
The MacOS 9 install went fine, then the YDL 2.3 install would:

1) Hang when formatting the drive
- I am aware of the bug in the installer - this is not the case because
I defined the partitions without deleting any.
	
2) Format completes (too quickly) and installs of packages would hang
	
So, I tried reinstalling YDL 2.2 instead and it would refuse to boot
giving a kernel panic about accessing a bad area.

Out of curiosity, I booted MacOS 9 and it was fine.

Could it be that MacOS 9 installed fine because it does not care if the
hard drive is on it's death bed? Is the install problem with YDL 2.2
caused by an almost dead drive? ( It installed extremely smoothly when I
first installed it)

Anyone with any ideas? I would appreciate if anyone knows what is going
on. I dont want to buy a new hard-drive unless my current one is truly
dead.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mussadique