A tale of woe that ended on a happier note.
Background: Hard drive getting full (4/250 GB left), decided to clone to a larger hard drive, done this before (piece of cake, or so I thought).
Stuff Needed: New 2.5 hard drive (SATA) in a USB external hard drive enclosure, Super Duper or Disk Utility.
What went wrong:
Never mind, Ill try again using Super Duper as Ive done this before and it was easy as.
Grey matter starts working, maybe this might not be a coincidence.
CONCLUSION 1: dont try cloning unless you are sure your HD is error free.
Never mind, Ill run Disk Utility and Repair the volume as the computer has been booting up fine and everything runs OK.
How can that be if its booting up fine and all my Applications are running ?
Since the HD had been booting up and running fine up to this point, I decided maybe to give up on the clone idea and just Migrate it to a fresh OSX installation on the new drive.
WRONG: now the HD wont mount and shows up in Disk Utility as greyed out. Repair button is also greyed out so cant fix this.
CONCLUSION 2: you can force a stubborn HD to mount by interrupting a repair.
CONCLUSION 3: dont try using fsck if Disk Utility cant fix the node problem because it will fsck your HD.
What to do now ?
Grey matter starts working again, if I can copy from the Preview volume, why cant I clone it ? Everything looks like it is there including the System stuff.
Can this be true ?
CONCLUSION 4: in retrospect, the $108 Disk Warrior cost doesnt seem so bad.
Background: Hard drive getting full (4/250 GB left), decided to clone to a larger hard drive, done this before (piece of cake, or so I thought).
Stuff Needed: New 2.5 hard drive (SATA) in a USB external hard drive enclosure, Super Duper or Disk Utility.
What went wrong:
- Put drive into USB enclosure, plugged into USB port
- ran Disk Utility and selected the Restore option to make a copy of my HD to the external drive. This failed after several hours.
- Didnt have my Time machine HD on this trip, so used another USB drive and tried to do a Time Machine Backup. Couldnt complete the backup, just hung and left me with a large 80GB inProgress file on the drive.
Never mind, Ill try again using Super Duper as Ive done this before and it was easy as.
- Set Super Duper to copy HD to external, press Copy and waited. About 3 hours later Super Duper fails.
Grey matter starts working, maybe this might not be a coincidence.
- Checked in the Super Duper log file and noticed bright red text saying I have an Invalid node structure and mentioning the offending files name (a jpeg).
CONCLUSION 1: dont try cloning unless you are sure your HD is error free.
Never mind, Ill run Disk Utility and Repair the volume as the computer has been booting up fine and everything runs OK.
- Disk Utility failed at the Verify Disk stage (invalid node structure) and tells me what I already knew that I need to repair it.
- Hit the Repair button and sadly it too Fails and says the disk can not be repaired.
- Fire up Google and search for Invalid Node Structure Fix, lots of advice on using fsck (free comes with OS) or Disk Warrior (costs $108). Decided to try the free option first (in hindsight this was false economy).
- Booted from my Snow Leopard DVD, ran Disk Utility and Un-mounted the HD
- Ran fsck on the drive (drive0s2). Lots of encouraging text messages about what it was doing and then FAIL. Drive cant be fixed hardware fault
Since the HD had been booting up and running fine up to this point, I decided maybe to give up on the clone idea and just Migrate it to a fresh OSX installation on the new drive.
WRONG: now the HD wont mount and shows up in Disk Utility as greyed out. Repair button is also greyed out so cant fix this.
- Managed to get the Repair button to eventually activate by running verify first (which eventually fails).
- Then ran another Repair which also failed and the HD remained un-mounted and inaccessible.
- Repeated the Verify/Repair bit, but told the Repair to STOP after about 1 minute. Eventually got a load of fail messages once the repair had stopped, but the disk WAS MOUNTED so at least I could now access it.
CONCLUSION 2: you can force a stubborn HD to mount by interrupting a repair.
- Tried rebooting OSX and now it just hangs at the grey apple and spinning disk for some time then turns off. I now have an HD that wont boot in addition to its original Invalid node structure problem. To my mind the s in fsck is a typo.
CONCLUSION 3: dont try using fsck if Disk Utility cant fix the node problem because it will fsck your HD.
What to do now ?
- Opened the wallet, bought and downloaded Disk Warrior (many blogs had told me it can often succeed where Disk Utility fails and Im now desperate).
- Loaded DW onto a second MacBook Pro and then attached the dud HD via a USB enclosure.
- Ran DW and it started to rebuild the catalog. Looks promising. Told me there were errors (hardware), but kept on going to recover the files.
- When DW finished, it told me the HD could not be repaired as it now had hardware faults. However, on the plus side DW does mount a PREVIEW volume on the desktop containing the files it has recovered and suggests copying these off to another drive to save them.
Grey matter starts working again, if I can copy from the Preview volume, why cant I clone it ? Everything looks like it is there including the System stuff.
- Fire up Super Duper, attach the new blank HD via a second USB enclosure, select the Preview volume on the desktop as the source and the new HD as the destination and hit COPY. Low and behold it looks like it is working.
- Leave running overnight and in the morning I have a message saying it has completed the copy and made the volume bootable.
Can this be true ?
- Plugged the clone HD into the old MacBook Pro, held down the Option key and booted into the clone HD. Up comes my old OSX desktop, all my installed applications are there and all my old emails, settings, phots and iTunes.
CONCLUSION 4: in retrospect, the $108 Disk Warrior cost doesnt seem so bad.