Did Itunes 7 kill my Mac's Hard Drive?

No, but something got messed up pretty bad and yet-- even with directory identifier and thread errors on the drive-- I was able to recover my data and reinstall.

Update Below

I upgraded to iTunes 7 and then upgraded Quicktime because iTunes told me I needed to. When I upgraded iTunes I checked the box to get album artwork automatically and then I told iTunes to go ahead and get artwork for all of my music. I have over 11,000 songs. The computer slowed down, grinding at simple stuff, but I was able to cancel the artwork import and then I restarted for the new quicktime to take effect.

Only, my computer did not restart properly, it hung at the loading screen with the apple logo and spinning loading progress indicator beneath. The spinner just kept spinning.

Things I've tried and the results:

• Using apple+option+p+r to reset my nvram - same hang in booting at apple logo screen
• Using apple+option+o+f and trying "reset-nvram" and "reset-all" - same hang in booting at apple logo screen
• Booting into safe mode - get error screen that tells me to restart my computer in five languages with kernal panis error messages on top of that (see figure 1 below)
• Booting into single user mode - black error screen which tells me disk0s3 has an I/O error (see figure 2 below)
• Booting from install cd and using disk utility to "Repair Disk" - "The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired after 3 attempts" (invalid directory count errors and some other problems)

What Now? Well, I'm going to try to boot it into FireWire Target Disk mode and see if I can recover anything that way.

After that, everything I can think of costs money - TechTool Pro, DiskWarrior, taking it to the Apple Store, or any other data recovery service. If I had to pick one thing to save (please let me be able to save at least this one thing), it would be my iPhoto library. Really, I should have backed more of this up, but the really important things are backed up and the really good photos are on flickr. I'm not too concerned about the music, I can re-rip most of my collection and thanks to Wil Wheaton I know that I can at also get all of my iTunes purchased music back.

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Update: It booted as a firewire drive and I was able to use another mac at work to offload a lot of important stuff (all my photos, general documents and the 10 most important GBs of music are backed up now). So then a low level attempt to rebuild the drive failed. We tried some more resetting things like p-ram and then we used the disk utility to try to repair the disk again, it failed again, but less spectacularly than before. Then I just used the disc to reinstall with the archive and install option and it worked. Adium was corrupt, but still had all of my profiles after reinstalling. Menu Meters were missing, but also easily reinstalled. Neato. I'm impressed Macintosh.

Figure 1


Figure 2