Drive corruption help needed (Yikes!)

I have an early 09 white MacBook, intel dual 2 GHz. After running TTPro volume check from the TTP derive I got an error so I tried to verify using disk utility (from the same volume). Disk Utility also indicated an error, so I tried to repair it with Disk Utility, which finally said it couldn't repair and to restart and back up files before reinstalling. Unfortunately, When I try to restart I get a grey screen which says among other things debugger called: <panic>. There is a black message box which says: You need to restart your computer. Hold down the power key until it turns off, then press again. After doing this the same thing happens.

I need to get the data off. Files seemed ok until this happened, so hopefully They are still there. Any ideas or suggestions greatly appreciated. I had transferred large number of files from a Mac knocked out by the recent storm in order to move them just before this happened.

soapsudz said:

You could open the bottom case cover, remove the hard drive and put it into an external caddy so you can read it on another Mac. You could also boot from a Linux live CD or USB stick that supports reading from HFS filesystems, then copy the contents of the failing drive to another external drive.

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Thanks for the tips. I wound up booting from a DVD with a data recovery program called Data Rescue 3. I used an external HD which I made two partitions on, one for workspace and the other for cloning the bad volume. Now I have a copy of the bad drive which I can play with all I may need to after locking it. Looks like I recovered just about everything except my setup and logins, which will be onerous to redo, but my data is intact.

Data Rescue has a reverse clone function which will copy a damaged volume, I guess by building the directory structure and such from the files it has found. Since I hadn't been working with or deleting data files the cloned drive should have everything I need. I've already restored about 20GB worth of images. The "nightmare before Christmas" has a happy ending.

Service Droid said:

Your hard drive has a number of bad sectors causing kernel panic on startup (the error message you saw). Data Rescue is a great program in your situation.

I cannot stress enough the importance of backing up. Time Machine is built in to the OS and is incredibly simple to use.

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Thanks for comments. I actually think the drive is physically OK as has been regularly testing AOK. S.M.A.R.T. even shows good on another partition but there is an "invalid node structure" according to Disk Utility and Drive Genius. It was fine until a sync went bad, and I had recently de-fragged because it was getting a little sluggish. I'm starting to think that de-fragging is something one shouldn't bother with. I had just transferred a lot of photos for working on and filing away elsewhere and figured I could use all the efficiency I could get from the MacBook. Better to just optimize the directory with DiskWarrior.

Time Machine is something I have not used but I want to start. I've been concerned that it would eat up too much disk space. Ironically enough, my two new little WD USB hard drives, intended for backups, are presently data recovery drives.

biggd said:

Had a similar error, I was going to just do a clean install and bring my data back over. However with SSD prices so low, replacing your hdd with one would be a good cost to performance value.

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A good thought, with some of after holiday sales going on. There is also the fact that a SSD provides shock-proofing for a notebook.