Spinning Beach Ball of death during disk utility

Hi-

I'd boot to the OS install disc and run Repair Disk on the boot drive.
If the question to verify occurs, why not just repair?

BTW, how full is the hard drive?
Could be that you don't have enough free space.

drums77 wrote:
Go to disk utility and verify the startup disk, start the disk verification and the spinng beach ball of death coming up. After a minute the result is that the disk is ok. During the verify processing I see only the spinning ball.
Anyone???

Normal. The verify disk operation on the boot volume can take a while and Disk Utility may not be responding to the OS quickly enough so the mystic spinning lollipop pizza comes up for a while. Somewhere there is an actual disclaimer to that effect. It all comes from not being able to dismount the root volume, which complicates the process.