DiskWarrior failed to fix a B-tree error. Any hope left?

[nathanbenesh]

My recent (2012) MacBook Pro failed suddenly and catastrophically last week with an "Invalid B-tree node size error" (a solid freeze and forced restart seems to have done it).

After some forum perusing, I purchased and ran DiskWarrior on the drive with minimal success. It was able to create a new index that allowed me to save just a few of the files that had not been backed up. Most of the User directory contents were not restored by the DiskWarrior-created index, so I didn't save the changes that DiskWarrior had made.

The non-backed-up files aren't worth paying for a full data recovery service, but if there's still hope that I could restore them with software, then I would be willing to pay the $150 that Apple is asking to return the drive to me after a full AppleCare replacement.

So, that's the question. With a B-tree error, is there still hope if DiskWarrior has already failed?

 

[liya1201]

DiskWarrior has some "hidden features" that might be helpful to your situation. Please take a look following discussions in the link.

http://www.techsurvivors.net/forums/lofiversion/index.php?t14569.html

 

[NathanA]

AppleCare doesn't deal in data recovery, just hardware repair and replacement. If you are talking to them, that makes me think that your problem isn't just that there was some filesystem corruption, but that you are experiencing a hardware error with the disk. You didn't say if this was a 2012 cMBP or rMBP, so I can only guess that you have a cMBP with an actual hard drive in it?

If you have a hard drive-based Mac instead of a flash-based one, I would strongly encourage you to image the failing drive to a spare drive as soon as humanly possible. Then use all of your forensics and data recovery/repair tools on the clone. You aren't going to get very far with recovering your data if the data recovery software is constantly having to contend with read errors when accessing the disk. Also, if the drive is in the middle of failing, it is possible for it to continually get worse as time progresses, meaning that more and more stuff will continue to be lost until you make a copy of whatever is currently left.

-- Nathan

 

[jav6454]

[...]
So, that's the question. With a B-tree error, is there still hope if DiskWarrior has already failed?

Quick question, did you try OS X's built in recovery feature? It handles an OS reinstall without deleting files.