Hi Scott,
I'm reading this late, but all the advice you had from Jacob, Tim, and
David is good stuff. Normally when your run Disk Utility you select
the hard drive as "Macintosh HD" to repair permissions, etc. but
there is also an entry for the drive listed as space and Manufacturer
(e.g. "232.9 GB Fujitsu" plus model number. If you select that entry
then VO-right or tab to read the disk description, there will be a
summary listing of disk model type, connection bus, connection type,
connection type, write status, S.M.A.R.T. status, and partition map
scheme.
The S.M.A.R.T. status will read "verified" for a drive that is
properly functioning. I'll paste in a description from another web
site:
<begin quote>
S.M.A.R.T. Status
Some hard drives are capable of reporting problems before a hardware
failure occurs. This is known as Self-Monitoring, Analysis and
Reporting Technology or S.M.A.R.T. A hard drive's S.M.A.R.T. status
(if available) is only displayed when the the drive (e.g. 57.3 GB IBM
IC35L060A...) is selected on the left side of the window.
In Mac OS X 10.3, 10.4, or 10.5, look for the S.M.A.R.T. Status at the
bottom of the Disk Utility window. If this line is missing, it means
the drive does not support S.M.A.R.T. If the status is Verified, it
means the hard drive is probably functioning properly (although there
may still be directory issues that S.M.A.R.T. does not check). If the
status is Failing, you should backup your data and replace the hard
drive.
<end quote>
For your information, what Alsoft's Disk Warrior does, and does very
well, is recover the kind of directory information that sometimes gets
corrupted (as Tim described), that can be the source of your problems.
Hope this all works out for you!
Cheers,
Esther
On Dec 24, 2008, at 8:39 AM, Scott Chesworth wrote:
An update for anybody following this thread...
I wanted to install Leopard on to an external drive, just so I've got
something to boot up over Christmas... geek factor is firmly set to on
here! Thought I'd do that before I got into toying with Terminal and
disk warrior and suchlike. Amazingly, the setup assistant sees my old
macintosh HD volume and from the filesizes everything looks fine.
It's transfering over just over 100 GB as I write, which may take a
while yes, but it looks like this might save my bacon. If this does
work, it leads me to think that it's most likely to be something along
the lines of volume headers being corrupted or other such stuff that I
know nada about like Tim suggested rather than mechanical failure. Is
that a sensible assumption? Again assuming this works, I was planning
to go for a format of the internal drive and a reinstall, but is there
any checks I can do on top of the usual disk utility stuff to get a
better idea of whether my hd is on its way out?
Cheers
Scott
On 12/24/08, Tim Kilburn <[email protected]> wrote:
Scott,
Yes, it is version 4 that I use. You can download it from the vender
right away so you don't have to wait for the Cd to arrive. If you
decide to give it a try, let me know and I'll give you some tips that
should help. It's actually a very quick process once it starts and
well worth the cash in my mind.
Later...
On 24-Dec-08, at 8:45 AM, Scott Chesworth wrote:
yup, doesn't look like archive and install is gonna be a choice here
because the leopard installer doesn't even give me macintosh hd as
an
option to install onto. ugh!
I guess I'm gonna have to stump up the cash for disk warrior from
somewhere. Tim, the accessibility issues you mentioned, was that
using version 4 out of interest? I can get a set of eyes on this
over
christmas if needs be, but it pains me to put down that much cash
for
software that I can't use. If it's the only way, so be it.
Cheers
Scott
On 12/24/08, David Poehlman
<[email protected]> wrote:
Ah, I remember, when this happened to my macbook, I could not
install
at all.
On Dec 24, 2008, at 10:25 AM, David Poehlman wrote:
also, remember that if you perform an archive and install, your
data
will not be lost.
On Dec 24, 2008, at 10:12 AM, Scott Chesworth wrote:
Hi David - this all sounds like its worth a shot. I'm a complete
terminal rookie though, so is there any chance you could mail me
over
the commands I'd need to mount disks and move files? Archive and
install is something I haven't tried yet, I guess I could use
that to
archive to my external hd and work on getting the data out once the
mbp is back up and running right?
cheers
Scott
On 12/24/08, David Poehlman <[email protected]
>
wrote:
if you can get the hd mounted from terminal, you should be able to
move the data. Then, it should be possible to do an erace-
install.
it might even be possible to do an archive and install by booting
from
the leopard dvd.
On Dec 24, 2008, at 8:57 AM, 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
Tim Kilburn
& Carter the Canine
Fort McMurray, AB Canada
