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Help! Hard Drive Unmounted...

M

Mr. Monsieur

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Apr 21, 2004
324
1
Hey Folks!

If someone could respond asap to at least part of the following, I would be incredibly grateful...as you will see below, I'm afraid to turn off my computer, for fear that I won't be able to restart it...are my fears justified? *Thank you* for any help you can offer!

So...I'm supposed to be selling my computer tomorrow, so I was trying to do a zero erase from the Disk Utility option on the install disk, nothing seemed to be happening (I waited and waited), so I clicked on "skip," and again nothing happened. I wasn't sure what to do, so I went to Disk Utility ->Quit Disk Utility. I then got a warning message that Disk Utility was still working and that if I didn't let it finish, that something might happen to the hard drive. So I waited...and waited...and waited. Fed up, I went ahead and shut it down. I then (stupidly!) tried to do the zero erase again, and went through the exact same process. Only, after *this* time, the hard drive no longer appears as an option as a place that I can install OSX. :-( not good.
At present I've got Disk Utility (from the install disks) open, and I've tried to do verify disk and repair disk, neither of which work...I keep getting the following message:
"Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed."
Fortunately Disk Utility still recognizes the presence of the hard drive, but it has changed the name of the drive to "disk0s2" and when I click on it, at the bottom it reads, "Mount Point: Not mounted, Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)"
I'm literally frozen right now...I'm afraid to turn off the computer, for fear that I won't be able to get it to start up again (is that a possibility?) It doesn't seem inclined to go into sleep mode, so I suppose I could just leave it on?
The main question, though, is how do I fix this? My inclination is to shut down the computer, take out the hard drive, connect it to my iMac, erase it, reformat it, and then use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my iMac's hard drive to it...do you think this would work? If not, what else can you suggest?
Thanks in advance!
 
Don't worry about leaving the computer. You've just corrupted the hard drive by interrupting the formatting process. Select the drive in Disk Utility, select Erase, and wipe the drive again.
 
Awesome...thank you! Pardon my ignorance, but in Disk Utility there are two Hard Drive icons, one above, and one right underneath, slightly indented...the one I'm doing this on is the indented one, correct?
(And why are they separated like that?)
 
The un-indented stands for the physical HD. The indented ones are the partitions on it. (In your case, there is only one partition).
So just select the lower one and erase it.
 
I actually suggest erasing the upper one instead, since it will wipe the entire drive including any unoccupied space.

However, flatfoot is correct about the indenting. This is how it looks with multiple drives and partitions:
 

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All of your own personal data is already OFF the internal drive, is that correct?

All you need to do is erase it, "zero it out", and reinstall from the original DVDs?

Then you want to boot from the install DVD and use Disk Utility to initialize the disk _and_ zero out the data while doing so.

BE FOREWARNED:
To zero out a drive, it must write to EVERY sector on the disk, and this takes time - hours in some cases.

If you cancelled mid-process, you can start over.

Just reboot from the System DVD, go to Disk Utility once again, and re-initialize.

BY THE WAY:
When you're looking in DU's window, you may see _two_ icons on the left representing your internal drive. As another poster mentioned, the top one represents the physical drive, and the one(s) below represent the partitions on that drive.

Choose the TOP icon, because you're trying to re-initialize the entire drive.

Go to options, again select to zero, and go.

SUGGESTION:
You just need to zero in "one pass". Even that may take a while. If you want more than a single pass, be prepared to wait for hours... and more hours.

- John
 
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