Help recovering disk

[icecavern]

I got my tiger disc yesterday so bought a USB2 160gb WD drive to back up all my data. I partitioned it into two drives and copied all my stuff onto the first drive.

Did a format and install and all was good, I copied my mail off the USB drive but then needed to print something out. I installed the print driver I used under panther but nothing prints even though OSX seems to think everythign is ok.

I then pulled out the usb cable for the USB drive and not the printer, and now I've lost my drive

I've tried the disc utils which says the disc needs repairing, but when I try to repair the disc all I get is...

Verify and Repair disk “Disk1”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Keys out of order
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
The volume Disk1 could not be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Repair attempted on 1 volume
1 volume could not be repaired

Can anyone help shed some light on how to fix this? I've basically lost my backup and that include loads of files used for the day to day running of my website and all my pictures etc.

Pete

 

[Thomas Veil]

I'm no expert, but I will tell you that the "keys out of order" is an ominous sign. Had that problem once with Jaguar -- not during an install or anything, it just happened -- and it took DiskWarrior to fix it.

 

[icecavern]

I've looked up disc warrior and noticed they don't do a Tiger version yet so I'l still stuffed

 

[Thomas Veil]

Well, I'd do two things:

(1) Wait a bit for someone else to respond. Believe me, there are plenty of smart MR members, and someone might have another suggestion.

(2) If all else fails, wipe your HD and reinstall Panther. Then try to run repairs on the drive again. If you still have a problem (and I suspect you might), then you can go to DiskWarrior.

Just to clarify...it sounds like your Mac can see the drive (because you attempted to repair it), but you just can't access your files on the drive? Does the drive appear on your desktop, or can you see it only through Disk Utility? If the disk isn't on your desktop, have you used Disk Utility to try to mount it? If the disk is visible on your desktop, what happens when you try to open a file or copy it back to your Mac?

 

[icecavern]

I've tried using the disc repair tools on my panther CD with no luck there either.

the drive is partitioned into two and the second drive ( which is currently empty as I've not used it yet ) mounts on the desktop fine. The first drive doesn't. When I open disc utilities the drive is there but wont mount the drive because it says I need to run first aid, but when I run repair I get the output above.

I guess I'm just going to have to wait until disk Warrior is updated to Tiger and then buy that, money I dont have after buying tiger and this HD

 

[Thomas Veil]

bump

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[yellow]

Unfortunately, this is a job for DiskWarrior or TechToolPro. DW doesn't work for Tiger yet, unsure about TTP.

 

[jaykk]

I made the same mistake..

WARNING : Don't remove the disk before ejecting (unmounting) in Tiger.

I did this by mistake too, but when i reconnected the drive back, Tiger crashes ( Kernal Panic). As soon i reconnect the drive, Spotlight tries to index it and throws Kernal Panic ( a big Tiger Bug - is there a way to turn off Spotlight for external drives?). So i booted in Safe Mode, and try to repair disk. No go. (Keys out of order..1 volume could not be repaired)

So, i searched around, I found the hint at
Link ( macosxhints.com)

So if you are comfortable with terminal, you can try dd command to get ur data back, but you need a lot of free space to create the diskimage. I am doing this as I type this.

 

[icecavern]

thanks all for your answers.

Jaykk that would explain the problem I'm having I guess.The only problem with using dd is that i've got 65GB free on my powerbook and a 120gb partition. Even though I only used 30gb on the disk. Is there a way to get DD to stop at say 35gb?

If not it looks like I'll have to wait for a Tiger version of disk Warrior.

 

[icecavern]

jayKK did this fix your problem?

I don't have a second 120gb drive to try that on though

 

[icecavern]

Bought a copy of ProSoft Data Rescue and that did the trick for me by the looks of it. It seems to be reporting a bad block, whether that is a corruption problem or a hardware fault I don't know at the minute but it looks like I've recovered my files so I'm happy.

Pete