Directory mismatch - Disk Utility fails

[deipnosophista]

I have a PowerPC Powerbook G4 running OS10.5.8 which has been running very roughly recently. I'm going on a trip at the end of next week and decided to check it out today.

I found that the problem is a disc one: running Disk Utility, I'm told that there is a directory count mismatch, and Disk Utility can't repair it. It's an old machine and I can't find the operating system installation disc, so I can't reinstall from scratch, and I'd like to avoid this because the last backup was some months ago and anyway it's time-consuming. Various websites advised DiskWarrior, which I duly bought online for about $120.

The instructions were a bit confusing and I started by trying to run DiskWarrior from the hard disc, but generated the message that you could not run it on the disc it was repairing. I tried to run DiskWarrior from a DVD, but got the message that "OSX ignores ownership of some disks by default" and that I should either run it from the application installation disk, or change the permissions on the disk by accessing the Info item on the File menu. I cannot do the first, since the disk has not yet arrived and will not for ten days or so. And when I try the second I find that permissions are greyed out and cannot be changed.

I tried putting DiskWarrior onto a flash drive, with the same result. Then I put it onto my iMac 8,1 running OS10.6.8 as a target disk using Firewire, with the same result again. I'm stuck. What now?

 

[jbarley]

when you do a "Get Info" on your hard drive there should be a small "padlock icon" at the bottom right of the Info panel.
Clicking on this should allow you to change the permissions.

PS: as mentioned you cannot run DW on the drive you are booted from, so you'd need to boot from a cloned drive (which is what I and many others do) or the DW DVD which you do not have yet.
It is also possible to run DW from another computer using Target disc mode.

 

[eyoungren]

Call Alsoft. You should be able to download a DMG through them from which you can burn to a disk. DW contains it's own limited version of OSX for booting.

If you cannot get a hold of Alsoft or you can't get resolution from them and you happen to use iChat or AOL, lookup marcmoorash (that's his IM name on AOL)

Marc is one of Alsoft's engineers and he is extremely helpful. He rescued my PowerBook hard drive once and even paid for the shipping to and from. You cannot beat Alsoft's customer service.

This sounds like something that DW can handle but DW needs to unmount your drive to work. It cannot be unmounted if you are booted from it, which is why it comes on a bootable DVD.

Be wary though. Usually this kind of thing is a sign that your hard drive is going bad. I had DW save me twice before my drive died. That's when Marc came in.