…involuntary “Internet fast” for yr. intrepid web-editor today and part of yesterday.

At exactly 3:15 p.m. Wednesday, my hard drive froze. It wouldn’t restart; all I got was the gray screen of suspended animation, Mac OS X’s counterpart to Windows’s blue screen of death. I was able to boot up from the external hard drive, but the internal drive didn’t even appear. None of the diagnostic applications to which I had access could fix it—Disc First Aid just gave up, and Norton Utilities crashed.

Bright n’ early Thursday morning, a friend came over to lend me his expertise and his copy of DiscWarrior. That program churned and stalled for nine hours without rebuilding my corrupted directory structure.

What I was able to do was get online while booting up form the external drive. I downloaded an OS upgrade, which enabled my external drive to perform a basic boot-time rebuilding on my internal drive, making it visible again. Two restarts later, I was booting from the internal drive again.

I’ve been able to make a complete backup. And I’ve obviously been able to get online and post this. It’s still running slowly (my friend suspects the OS is struggling to find dats within a still-corrupt directory structure).

This is the first time anything like this has happened to me under OS X. Under the old Mac OS, this sort of thing happened enough times a year that I could remember what to do about it.

As for why it happened, I’ve two theories:

• I’ve been running my iBook with dangerously little free hard-drive space. OS X uses virtual memory, particularly when accessing web sites that use Flash animation.
• OS X update 10.3.5 may be unstable. Stick to 10.3.4.