Problems Were Found With The Partition Map

Do as instructed - you really just need to verify and repair the "Macintosh HD" partition.

Boot to your Recovery partition by starting up whilst holding down the Command and R keys. When the Recovery screen comes up, use Disk Utility to try and verify and repair the Macintosh HD partition. DU may be able to repair it, maybe not - it could be a sign that your disk is failing.

If you can boot to Macintosh HD, I would immediately backup all data before attempting a repair. Your drive may be unsalvageable at this point and you need - now - to try some backup scheme before the disk fails entirely.

Good luck - call back...

Clinton

Yep - and that's why I buy AppleCare. You're in OK shape - take the machine to your local Apple Store or an AASP and have them run diagnostics on the drive. A replacement should be free. If they will (and can) you may get them to either salvage the data off the bad drive or let you keep the drive so that you can put it in a simple enclosure and use a tool such as Data rescue 3 to try to salvage the data?

Just wondering - do you have a backup scheme in place?

Clinton

Shouldn't be more than 15-20 minutes, if they have a drive in stock. They may not have a 320GB but they may 'upgrade' you to a 500GB or something just to fix your problem.

Glas to see that you bought an external for backup purposes - I use have both Time Machine backup drives as well as cloned backups and recommend that others do the same... at least one drive dedicated to Time Machine and at least one drive dedicated to a clone.

Clinton

No, they shouldn't charge you a thing. Just let them know that you want the drive fixed and, if they don't have any 320GB drives in stock, you'll take a larger drive - if it's free. Don't let them tell you that you'll be without your computer for 4-5 days until a 320GB drive can be ordered. It only takes about 10-15 minutes to install the drive and a little longer to install the OS, so you should expect same day service.

Good luck,

Clinton

No problem - I'm just learning (well, for 4 months now) HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript... I have to take a break sometime!

Clinton