I think my Leopard Install is Cooked-Suggestions?

[bunnspecial]

Somehow, somewhere along the way I've managed to screw up the Leopard install on my Quicksilver.

I know I should have backed up, but didn't, so I'd really like to get it going again. As best as I can tell, everything is intact, it just won't boot.

Sometimes, it will hang at the gray screen with the progress indicator spinning. Other times, it will boot to a blue scree with a cursor, but the login prompt never appears.

Booting in safe mode does not change anything.

I think I can safely rule out a computer problem-it boots to Tiger just fine, as well as when I put my Powerbook in TDM and boot off the Leopard install on its hard drive.

I've tried repairing the disk and repairing permissions from Diskutility when booted from the Powerbook.

I've also been able to successfully boot into single user mode. I've run fsck from single user mode a couple of times. Generally, it will report that it made modifications the first time it is run. In accordance with how I understand to use this tool, when I run it a second time it reports the file system as fine. Rebooting gets me back to what's described above.

As I said, I really want to preserve this Leopard install for a variety of reasons.

Is there anything else I can do to try and fix this? Failing that, is it possible to use the Leopard install disk(which I have, but not with me at the moment) to do a "repair" install that will basically keep everything as is but fix the underlying problems?

 

[Surrat]

I had a mirror door doing similar behavior to that, it turned out to be bad ram slots on the motherboard. I finally had to junk that board.

Try removing some ram, and see how it runs.

 

[bunnspecial]

If it were a RAM or logic board problem, why would the computer boot fine with things other than this specific Leopard install?

In any case, I'm currently trying to boot in Verbose mode, and this seems to be where it's hanging

mds[37]: (Error) Server: mdsync launch failed (ipc/rcv) timed out

Here's a photo(blurry) of the verbose mode start-up screen

 

[reco2011]

Probably the hard disk starting to fail. Pull what you can off of it as soon as you can.

 

[bunnspecial]

Probably the hard disk starting to fail. Pull what you can off of it as soon as you can.

This is a brand new WD Caviar Blue manufactured in Feb. 2011 with about 20 hours of run time on it.

I actually cloned the install yesterday off the old hard drive-a 120gb Maxtor with about 1000 hours of run time that Smart Utility was telling me was failing.

I was having the same problem on the old hard disks-I thought it might be a permissions issue, and went ahead and cloned it because I know CCC repairs permissions as part of the cloning process.

I have Tiger on the same hard drive and it boots fine.

 

[Altemose]

This is a brand new WD Caviar Blue manufactured in Feb. 2011 with about 20 hours of run time on it.

I actually cloned the install yesterday off the old hard drive-a 120gb Maxtor with about 1000 hours of run time that Smart Utility was telling me was failing.

I was having the same problem on the old hard disks-I thought it might be a permissions issue, and went ahead and cloned it because I know CCC repairs permissions as part of the cloning process.

I have Tiger on the same hard drive and it boots fine.

If you cloned this Leopard install off a failing drive, it is likely that the clone has similar corruption. A fresh install should fix it easily!

 

[eyoungren]

Well, mdsync is Spotlight, so maybe the Spotlight database has gone corrupt.

Try booting in Tiger, then on the Leopard disk go to the Spotlight DB files and move them elsewhere. Then try booting.

Your Spotlight index will have to rebuild, but small price to pay for booting.

You'll have to Google where these are as I don't recall.

Failing that, find a copy of Diskwarrior. DW 4.4 is universal (so is 4.3). DW is far more robust than Disk Utility.

 

[Hrududu]

I had a mirror door doing similar behavior to that, it turned out to be bad ram slots on the motherboard. I finally had to junk that board.

Try removing some ram, and see how it runs.

I'm gonna echo this. Not with a PowerMac, but I've had a similar problem with my 867MHz TiBook. One of the RAM slots is flaky, and Tiger will run well, but Leopard will not. It was extremely difficult to get it to install, and once I did it would kernel panic after only a few seconds. I suggest running Rember and then removing sticks one at a time.

 

[bunnspecial]

Well, mdsync is Spotlight, so maybe the Spotlight database has gone corrupt.

Try booting in Tiger, then on the Leopard disk go to the Spotlight DB files and move them elsewhere. Then try booting.

Your Spotlight index will have to rebuild, but small price to pay for booting.

You'll have to Google where these are as I don't recall.

Failing that, find a copy of Diskwarrior. DW 4.4 is universal (so is 4.3). DW is far more robust than Disk Utility.

That actually makes sense, as I recently re-enabled spotlight(after having it off for a while) and had not rebooted the computer since.

I just deleted the index, so we'll see what happens.

 

[bunnspecial]

No luck with playing around with Spotlight....


I even went back into single user mode and disabled it completely, but the computer still won't boot.

I'm currently using Disk Warrior to repair the permissions...interestingly enough, it would not do so when booting from the Disk Warrior disk. I had to install it on my Powerbook, then boot the Quicksilver from that and do the permissions repair.

I'll report back in a little while when that is done.

If this doesn't work, I'll do an archive and install tomorrow.

 

[eyoungren]

No luck with playing around with Spotlight....


I even went back into single user mode and disabled it completely, but the computer still won't boot.

I'm currently using Disk Warrior to repair the permissions...interestingly enough, it would not do so when booting from the Disk Warrior disk. I had to install it on my Powerbook, then boot the Quicksilver from that and do the permissions repair.

I'll report back in a little while when that is done.

If this doesn't work, I'll do an archive and install tomorrow.

Just for clarification, DW does a bit more than just that.

What it actually does is find all your data, then it reconstructs a disk directory based on what it found. It then replaces your corrupt directory with the new one it constructed.

It's capable of doing this when the drive is failing, it's capable of fixing Catalog errors and B-tree errors (something Disk Utility can NOT do) and if you ever happen to work with Alsoft support there are certain commands that they can give you that lead to even more powerful options. DW can also allow you to get data off your drive to a different drive.

P.S., you can "Scavenge" a drive, versus "Rebuild" if you hold down Optn when you go to click on the Rebuild button (it will change to Scavenge). Scavenge is a different mode that forces DW to search your drive thoroughly for all bits of data.

My apologies if you already knew this, but I just needed to clarify that it's not just a permissions fixer.

 

[bunnspecial]

No luck with Disk Warrior. I tried both rebuilding the directory and repairing permissions, and didn't improve anything. It looks like it's going to be archive and install.

With that said, I don't think that my time spent with Disk Warrior is totally lost. I have a corrupted flash drive that was formatted HFS+ and has been unreadable for a while. DiskWarrior seems to think it can fit it, so I'm letting it try. The drive didn't have anything important on it, but did have a bunch of my commonly-used PPC files that I kept handy.

 

[bunnspecial]

Archive+Install got me going again.

I'm just glad that I at least had the foresight to download the 10.5.8 combo update and save it on a flash drive, as it really cuts out a lot of time moving into the new install.

 

[bunnspecial]

By the way, Disk Warrior really is an amazing program.

I got my black MacBook cheap because of a dead drive. It would start but hang at the Apple. This really wasn't an issue for me, as I just stuck an SSD in and used an old Time Machine back-up from my white MacBook when it was running 10.7.

In any case, I played with the old hard drive a little bit and found that it would mount when put in an external enclosure but was not readable.

On a whim, I used Disk Warrior to rebuild the directory. Much to my(pleasant) surprise the drive was readable and bootable. If it had been my data that I couldn't get off the drive, I would have been very excited . Since its not my data, I'm instead going to write the seller and ask of he wants it. If not, I'll dump it and put a fresh user account in it.

 

[eyoungren]

By the way, Disk Warrior really is an amazing program.

Absolutely!

It's done the job for me every time I've needed it.

What's even more amazing though is their tech support. Had my laptop drive die about six years ago. No backup. Worked with their chief tech guy via iChat and he had me typing commands that made DW even more powerful.

Ultimately there was nothing he could do over iChat so he asked me to send the drive and a backup drive to him in Texas. But it gets better!

I didn't have any money right then so the tech shipped me a FedEx box, paid for the shipping of the package back to him and paid again to ship it all back to me!

With all my data recovered!

He said he wasn't sure about the bad drive when he first got started, but found that if he held it at a certain angle he was able to get all my data off.

That's service!