Hi Scott
My initial thought leads me to suspect hard drive failure in this
case, specifically the fact that fsck_hfs is not able to repair your
volume at all typically means it's a physical problem with the disk.
I'm not going to guarantee that you can get your data off of this
drive, but here's what I would do:
boot off the leopard DVD and launch terminal. Mount your macbook drive
and your external drive, like this (note: device names may vary, and
directories must already exist):
mkdir /Volumes/macbook
mkdir /Volumes/usb
mount -t hfs /dev/disk0s2 //Volumes/macbook
mount -t hfs/dev/disk1s1 /Volumes/usb
You can find the device names by going into disk utility. You may also
be able to mount them from there, but if the mount operation fails
using the terminal will give you more detail about what has gone wrong.
Once the drives are mounted, use the cp command to copy over your home
folder, something like this would do it (change names as appropriate):
cp -R /Volumes/macbook/Users/Scott /Volumes/usb
You won't see any progress indicators and it will take a while. No
news is good news, so if after a while you're dropped back to the
terminal then nothing went wrong
Otherwise, if you get errors such as "i/o error" or "request failed"
then that area of the disk is gone.
Once you've gotten as much off of there as you can, unmount both
volumes. Verify all your data, then attempt a reinstall if you wish,
though that will be no help if the disk has gone south.
hope this helps
On Dec 24, 2008, at 08:57, Scott Chesworth wrote:
Hey folks, I have here one very unhappy macbook pro, hopefully someone
on here has ideas that I haven't yet tried to get him back on his
feet.
So the other day, I boot the mbp up, get the usual chime sound, the
apple logo comes up, stays there for a minute or so, and the mbp turns
straight back off. "not good" says I. I can't think of anything I've
installed or changed lately to cause this. I've tried holding option
and forcing it to boot from macintosh HD with the same result, holding
shift key for safe mode with the same result, holding s for single
user mode with - you guessed it - the same result. I've booted from
my Leopard DVD and tried varifying and repairing the volume from Disk
Utility there. In both cases, I get an error that says "filesystem
varify or repair failed", and ocasionally I get a "the underlying task
has failed" instead... uh oh! Some frantic Googling later, I found
myself in terminal trying to repair the volume with fsck_hfs because
it seems some folks have had more luck this way, but no joy. Terminal
does give me messages about an invalid sibbling link though sometimes,
which while it isn't what I want to hear, at least it's something a
bit more specific.
If anyone has any thoughts, they'd be so worth a shot. I've got 100
GB or so of data on this thing that isn't backed up (yep, apparently I
can be that stupid). I have space on an external drive that I just
picked up, if I can only figure out a way to get the data off and go
for a clean install.
TIA
Scott
The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a
thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot
possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to
get at or repair.
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