It’d be worth taking your computer in to a repair center (or over to a Mac geek’s house) and trying to remote mount the disk to salvage your personal data, but there are no guarantees at this point. If it reports errors each time and never cleans up, well, then you probably need to just reformat your hard disk and reinstall the operating system. And again, until you can get through your disk without any errors reported. Once the fsck program is done, run it again. The program will probably find a pile of things wrong with your disk, just say “yes” to every “fix?” prompt and see how it goes. The easiest way to do that is to just type fsck -f and let it run. So you’ll want to run the fsck program by hand and see what it finds. Unfortunately, your disk probably doesn’t look good. Every time you boot without shutting down properly, and once every 20 or so “clean” reboots, the fsck program analyzes the disk to ensure everything looks good.

The fsck program runs disk consistency checks similar to Disk Utility and other fancy applications, but at the command line. To check your hard disk, you need to run a program on the command line (where you are when you stop the boot sequence in single user mode) called fsck (pronounced “eff-ess-check” by Unix cognoscenti).

I’m only going to address that last scenario, as I bet that’s what’s wrong. One of three things can occur: it’ll reboot and go into full GUI mode as if nothing was wrong (and perhaps nothing is wrong!), it’ll reboot and go back to single-user mode, or it’ll try to progress by scanning your hard disk for errors and fail with some horrible errors. If nothing’s significantly wrong, it might be acting weird so a first test would be to type reboot at the prompt and see what happens. You can force a Mac to do this by holding down the Command (cloverleaf) and S keys on boot up. What’s happening with your Mac OS X Panther PowerBook is that it’s booting into single-user mode, rather than automatically moving through the different init states into multi-user, full GUI, network mode. While your computer doesn’t heal in the same way that your body does, the situation you’re in should be recoverable. This sounds like a terrible situation and I’m certainly sorry to hear about your auto accident.

How to boot into disk utility mac 10.4