Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Formatted drive, now I can't reinstall

steve2112

steve2112

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Feb 20, 2009
3,023
6
East of Lyra, Northwest of Pegasus
I am in the process of selling my old Mini, so after migrated all my data to my new one, I wiped the drive (wrote zeros). I initially tried installing from the Snow Leopard disk, but the install failed for some reason. So, I pulled out my Leopard disk and attempted an install just to see if it was the disk or something like that. That also failed, so I ran disk utilities on the hard drive. After running repair disk, I got the error: "Invalid B-tree node size. Volume check failed. Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed."

Any ideas? The hard drive was working fine before I wiped it.
 
That's not encouraging. It could be that the drive was not in fact working fine but just hadn't shown its deteriorating condition until you tried to write files en masse by reinstalling. If you have Drive Genius or TechTool, you could try running a surface scan. Unless the bad sectors are in a vital area of the drive, the format should've cleared them up.

The best I can suggest is to see if you can find a new inexpensive hard drive or accept the price cut of selling with a failing drive or without a drive at all.
 
It's possible that the error is from the borked installation of Snow Leopard. Did you reformat after that? In addition to Mac OS Extended Journaled, did you use the proper partition map, GUID for Intel Macs and APM for PowerPC Macs? Is the old mini a PowerPC mini? If so, Snow Leopard is Intel only. The disc for Leopard that you tried to use, was it from the new or the old mini, or was it a retail disc?
 
DewGuy1999 said:
It's possible that the error is from the borked installation of Snow Leopard. Did you reformat after that? In addition to Mac OS Extended Journaled, did you use the proper partition map, GUID for Intel Macs and APM for PowerPC Macs? Is the old mini a PowerPC mini? If so, Snow Leopard is Intel only. The disc for Leopard that you tried to use, was it from the new or the old mini, or was it a retail disc?
Click to expand...

It's a 1.83 CD Mini. I set it up for GUID. After the SL install failed, I tried my family pack of Leopard, but that failed as well. I tried the SL first because I was going to sell it with the Mini. I want to keep the Leopard disk in case I need to re-install on my Powerbook.

Tech Tools couldn't do much with it, either. I did some searching, and it looks like Disk Warrior has fixed this error for a lot of people, but I don't have a copy of it. I may have to put the original 80GB drive back in there. I just hate to break the case open again. The sad part is I just put this upgraded drive in there a few months back, but I think it's not under warranty. It was bought for another machine a while back, but I never installed it there.

Edit: I forgot to add that I also tried reloading from a Carbon Copy Cloner image on an external drive. It got almost finished loaded and failed.
 
Try this.

To run fsck, you first need to start up your Mac in single-user mode. Here's how:

1. Restart your Mac.
2. Immediately press and hold the Command and "S" keys.
You'll see a bunch of text begin scrolling on your screen. In a few more seconds, you'll see the Unix command line prompt (#). Congratulations. You're now in single-user mode. I bet you've never seen your Mac screen look like that before. (I wish I could show you a screen shot of it, but as far as I can tell, it's not possible. And photos of it are ugly.)

Now that you're at the # prompt, here's how to run fsck:

1. Type: "fsck -y" (that's fsck-space-minus-y).
2. Press Return.
The fsck utility will blast some text onto your screen. If there's damage to your disk, you'll see a message that says:

***** FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED *****

If you see this message--and this is extremely important--repeat Steps 1 and 2 again and again until that message no longer appears. It is normal to have to run fsck more than once -- the first run's repairs often uncover additional problems..

When fsck finally reports that no problems were found, and the # prompt reappears:

3. Type: "reboot" to restart,
or type "exit" to start up without rebooting.
4. Press Return.
Your Mac should proceed to start up normally to the login window or the Finder.
Click to expand...
 
To clarify, did you reformat after the aborted installs? Are you reformatting using Disk Utility on the OS X install disc?

I'm confused by the error message, because I would think that when the drive is formatted it wouldn't have a B-tree node to have an invalid size, if it does then wouldn't that mean that Disk Utility is causing it with formatting the drive?
 
DewGuy1999 said:
To clarify, did you reformat after the aborted installs? Are you reformatting using Disk Utility on the OS X install disc?

I'm confused by the error message, because I would think that when the drive is formatted it wouldn't have a B-tree node to have an invalid size, if it does then wouldn't that mean that Disk Utility is causing it with formatting the drive?
Click to expand...

Yea if he completely wiped it there shouldn't be any directory errors, unless there is something wrong with the drive physically. He should still run a fsck to see if it's the directory tree or not.
 
BittenApple said:
Yea if he completely wiped it there shouldn't be any directory errors, unless there is something wrong with the drive physically. He should still run a fsck to see if it's the directory tree or not.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I did completely wipe the drive and then try the installs. I forgot to mention earlier that I ran fsck a couple of times, and got a bunch of errors. The last one I ran came up with several, including "invalid node height", "invalid backward link", "invalid forward link", "invalid record count", before finally ending with "The volume MiniHD could not be repaired".

I think it's dead, Jim. I wish SpinRite worked on Macs. :)
 
NIPRING said:
Just out of curiosity, did you try installing via Target mode?
Click to expand...

No. I was going to use target disk mode, but the new Mini has FW800, and I didn't have a FW400-800 cable. I did use migration assistant over the network to setup the new Mini, and that went fine. I didn't run into problems until trying to reformat the old Mini HD to prep for sale. I did boot to my CCC image on an external drive, and try to load that way. It failed as well.
 
steve2112 said:
Yeah, I did completely wipe the drive and then try the installs. I forgot to mention earlier that I ran fsck a couple of times, and got a bunch of errors. The last one I ran came up with several, including "invalid node height", "invalid backward link", "invalid forward link", "invalid record count", before finally ending with "The volume MiniHD could not be repaired".

I think it's dead, Jim. I wish SpinRite worked on Macs. :)
Click to expand...

I'll admit that I don't have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, but, it seems to me that if you're running fsck from a disc that has had a borked installation done on it, errors are to be expected.

If you boot from the install disc, format the hard drive and then have Disk Utility verify/repair disk, what happens, do you get errors?
 
DewGuy1999 said:
I'll admit that I don't have a lot of experience with this kind of thing, but, it seems to me that if you're running fsck from a disc that has had a borked installation done on it, errors are to be expected.

If you boot from the install disc, format the hard drive and then have Disk Utility verify/repair disk, what happens, do you get errors?
Click to expand...

All those errors were on my latest attempt at running fsck from terminal utility from the SL install disk. This was after running the repair disk option using Disk Utility from the same disk. The error after running repair disk basically said "disk could not be repaired" and it recommended backing up files and reinstalling, which I found amusing, since this is exactly what I am trying to do. :)

Edit: the exact error is "Invalid key length. The volume could not be verified completely. Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk.". Then it advised backing up files and reinstalling.
 
Did you wipe zero the drive?

maybe you can boot using dban and use that to erase the drive (20x pass should be fine) and then see if it works.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back