Cube mainboard toast?, Tiger security updates voids boot partition, hardware test spits out i Options Menu

[icerabbit]

The fairly stock cube on my desk has been powered up less & less. I guess that's normal when it becomes a secondary and tertiary system when faster hardware is around.

It ran Tiger 10.4.11 fine up to last night. It started fine, software update presented some updates for some of the Apple apps (Safari, ...) and a security update 2008-xxxx (forgot). Decided to do the security update only. It downloaded, installed and rebooted.

After it does the POST bong, the Cube gets stuck at the gray Apple logo with spinning wheel under it.

Booting with the Shift key doesn't work. It gets stuck at the same location.

Firewire Target Drive Mode to a Leopard machine. The Finder shows the second and third partition (file storage) not the primary one. Disk Utility sees the primary partition but can't repair it.

First Aid failed.
Disk Utility stopped working "IQ Boot" because the following error was encountered.
Filesystem verify or repair failed.
Details are:
Invalid content in Journal
Checking Journaled HFS Plus Volume
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid node structure
Volume check failed.
Invalid content in journal
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

Decided to do a hardware test with the Cube hardware test CD.

Quick test:
Airport: not found (OK, there isn't one)
Logic board, Memory, Modem, Video RAM: passed

Extended test:
Logic board: failed

***ERRROR*CODE***ERROR*CODE***
fire/5/-49993
***ERRROR*CODE***ERROR*CODE***

And then the test is halted.

What does that code mean?
Since it says "fire" does that mean one of my firewire ports is toast?
Or is the motherboard on the way out?

Which then would mean I went from a fully functional cube to a corrupt primary partition and a toast motherboard; when I installed the 2008 security update.

Btw. There was no power interruption during the installation. It is on a voltage regulated UPS.

Also, when I boot from an external firewire optical drive (built-in is CDRW) I only get the third partition as a destination option. The first and secondary are not visible. Which puzzles me ... I thought / hoped to do an archive install on the primary.

Any thoughts & help are greatly appreciated.

This post has been edited by icerabbit: Oct 2 2008, 10:47 AM