I've recently installed a brand new hard drive (80gig) and then installed OSX Panther (10.3) on it. It was working fine and then I installed some applications (Final Cut, Final Draft) It was working fine. Then I updated to the latest OS (10.3.8) and it was still working fine! I have loaded a lot of data (around 35gig) onto the new drive and have been working on it. And yesterday, when I switched it on, it seemed to be starting up fine and then got so far and just stopped. It gets to the OSX start up page and the progress bar moves along and it says what it's doing, until it reaches "Login Window starting" and it just stays there. I've tried starting in "safe mode" but that doesn't work, it just forces a normal start up. I've tried booting from the install disk and using "Disk Utility" and it says there are errors but can't repair the disk. Surely if the start up process is getting that far then it can't be TOO serious? I really hope I don't have to wipe my hard drive. Any ideas?

if errors are bad blocks, you may need something like norton utilities to repair, may need to boot from floppy or cd or other drive so that programs are not running on drive being fixed, check which extension/icon loads at the time of freeze and disable, may need to scan disk and defrag(largest swap file may be too small for loading), if you have partion... load and boot from it, if not, again try another drive, check connections on motherboard, ok,dont wipe drive yet though, also try virus scan or spyware scan...:)