Diagnose & repair with hard drive repair utilities
Whenever your trusty Mac starts acting a little odd, run a diagnostic utilities program to check the overall health of your hard drive. The Apple Disk First Aid program that is packaged with your System Software is actully quite good. It works best if you boot your Mac from an external drive (System 7 has taken us beyond the era of bootable floppy disks).
However, Norton Utilities and MacTools are more sophisticated. All of these utility programs can generally fix problems as well as detect them. If your computer is really hosed, they can also tell you what repair work is required.
