My emac keeps freezing!!! any help please

Disk Utility can't perform all its repair functions on an active startup disk. So, your problem may be resolvable if you could indeed boot from your scratched instal disk.

As it's no good, the best option is to find another one... Or find another Mac that you can use to connect to your eMac. (IE use a firewire cable, put the eMac into TARGET DISK MODE, and run Disk Utility that way).

You MAY have bad caps, a problem that some eMacs experienced leading to the computer freezing hard (ie you have to hold the power button for 10 seconds to shut the computer down, no other way to unfreeze), but as you've presumably not had any other freezing problems til now, and Disk Utility thinks there's a problem with your hard drive, I'd look at that issue first.

Message was edited by: cosmichobo

As it's no good, the best option is to find another one...

... or try a safe boot to effect the same.
How to start up in Safe Mode

This procedure runs a file system check. If it is fixable, it may be enough.
Otherwise put on your bad cap investigatin' cap and go a huntin'.
Posting pictures of such is always helpful.

You should check to see if your capacitors are bad. My eMac started having this exact same problem about a month ago and I finally just took it apart the other day and looked at it and there's two or three bad capacitors (bulging, one slightly leaking brown), so I'm going to have my much-more-experienced-with-soldering dad try to replace them with ones we ordered. Hopefully they work!

I'd check and see if this is the problem, then if it is, you will need to either replace the bad capacitors yourself, get someone experienced to do it, or buy a new board, which may cost far more than the eMac would be worth if it was working right anyway.

Of course, you can just scrap it and keep the hard drive and DVD drive and RAM. eMacs are getting kinda old nowadays. I went from an eMac 1.25 GHz to a Mac mini 2.0 GHz and it is sooooooooo much better. No more Flash headaches (or at least less of them), and everything runs so much smoother.

Best of luck.

Not sure if I can post this, but

http://forums.mactalk.com.au/10/91036-yes-i-did-repairing-faulty-emac-logic-boar d.html

On MacTalk (AU) there is a guy who has fixed a number of eMac logic boards with minimal experience.

2 or so out of 13 I think failed... but the rest were ok.