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HELP! trying to recover system!

T

Toby Goodbar

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 8, 2006
400
0
OK, Leopard has gained some problems. the disk cannont be repaired. in leopard disk utility (install disk booted) it says "invalid number of allocation blocks", if i verify instead of repair, its says same. booted in tiger it says of leopard drive that it has an invalid peof.

my powermac will no longer boot from the leopard drive, and i have since been having problems mounting it even though it can be seen.

originally to fix the problem i repaired the disk from tiger, and it seemed fine. but after installing a leopard update, the symptoms were back. and the tiger trick no longer worked. so i tried installing the ATA hi-cap drivers onto leopard in case that was the issue and it booted up (maybe a coincidence? who knows) when i came home from work my mac was shutoff even though i had left it on. and was later told it shutoff on itself. which leaves me where i introduced a description of the problem, and not being able to mount.

at this point i am ready to install a fresh copy on a spare hard drive i have just in case its a physical issue involved somehow, but i have no backup. is there a way i can mount or access the drive to use migration assistant or just flat out copy my iphoto database and other such files?

because i've tried archive but it won't even give me that option. it jus shows the disk with an exclamation mark from the install disk boot.

PS
i have a copy of disk warrior 4 that an old room mate gave me but i'm not familiar with it at all. i don't know if or how it could help.
 
I would read the documentation on DiskWarrior 4 and following the instructions exactly, use it on your Leopard drive. If the drive is borked it's probably your best bet for getting anything off of it.
 
well i used disk warrior, and was able to boot the drive and it is working faster and better than ever. i was actually amazed.

BUT, (always a but) i decided to try and boot fromt the install disc and run the apple disk repair to see if it found anything disk warrior missed and i still have the invalid allocation block error popping up at which point leopard becomes unbootable again. so i ran disk warrior and am in leopard now, typing this.

i don't know wether to be happy and leave it alone, or try to find a solution.

thanks in advance for the responses
 
Toby Goodbar said:
yes.
no. i decided not to install because i really don't need it since the "extra" isn't even seen by the system and im only using 63 gb. which means i don't see how its contributing to the problem.
Click to expand...

The reason I asked is, I saw this on their website under Limitations and thought it might be related to your problem:

if you boot your Macintosh from another source (such as a MacOS software installation CD/DVD or a disk repair utility CD/DVD), the SpeedTools ATA Hi-Cap Driver will NOT be available to load and your drive will revert back to the 128 Gigabyte limitation -- until you reboot from a drive which has the ATA Hi-Cap Driver installed again.

The easiest way to guard against problems relating to these situations (where the ATA H-Cap driver can't load), is to partition your drive using Apple's Disk Utility. You simply create one partition with the size of 128GB, and another partition for the remaining drive capacity. What this does is ensures that if the Hi-Cap driver cannot load for any reason, your Mac will continue to see and use your drive's first partition safely with 128GB limitation back in place and not touch/damage the second partition. Your second partion will return as soon as you reboot your Mac from a hard disk that has the driver installed. See our ATA Hi-Cap User's Guide for other partitioning stategies.
 
DewGuy1999 said:
The reason I asked is, I saw this on their website under Limitations and thought it might be related to your problem:

if you boot your Macintosh from another source (such as a MacOS software installation CD/DVD or a disk repair utility CD/DVD), the SpeedTools ATA Hi-Cap Driver will NOT be available to load and your drive will revert back to the 128 Gigabyte limitation -- until you reboot from a drive which has the ATA Hi-Cap Driver installed again.

The easiest way to guard against problems relating to these situations (where the ATA H-Cap driver can't load), is to partition your drive using Apple's Disk Utility. You simply create one partition with the size of 128GB, and another partition for the remaining drive capacity. What this does is ensures that if the Hi-Cap driver cannot load for any reason, your Mac will continue to see and use your drive's first partition safely with 128GB limitation back in place and not touch/damage the second partition. Your second partion will return as soon as you reboot your Mac from a hard disk that has the driver installed. See our ATA Hi-Cap User's Guide for other partitioning stategies.
Click to expand...


yea i saw that. thats also when i remembered thats when i didn't do that to the drive when i setup leopard on it. because i planned to keep the OS drive very minimal files in hopes to get the most speed. not have a crammed HD and plenty of room for whatever virtual memory the system wanted.
 
The only other thing I can think of at this point is to back up the Leopard drive, and then reformat it to <128GB rather than the current 150GB, and reinstall the OS and migrate your user data from the backup. Sorry I can't be any more helpful.
 
PROBLEM RESOLVED

i like to post updates in case future users have the same problem as me they can benefit. I went to the diskwarrior website thinking there might be some issue needing an update because i am on leopard which wouldn't have been available at the time and there is probly differences with the catalogging structure. (which i had thought about after tiger disk utility was giving me a different disk error on my leopard drive.)

in any event, the 4.2 update is compatible with leopard AND snow leopard, so i used the update version, rebuilt, then booted onto my leopard install disk, and repair disk found a couple errors and was able to fix them. So whatever the updated disk warrior was able to do, it made it possible for apple's native utilities to function again.

i have nothing to test the drive for any physical problems, but i think everything is A-OK! :)

i will be looking to purchase a larger external drive, and turning my current 500gb external into an internal for time capsule backups after this experience.

hope this helps someone in the future!
:apple:
 
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