iMac will not accept logons - Hard drive verify errors

[GlynJones]

Hi all,
Got up this morning and my iMac 24 had frozen. It does this every now and then and I’ve never managed to get to the bottom of it.

Rebooted and didn’t get my normal signon screen with my photo against my name. Tried to log in but would not allow me. Tried to log on as admin and got the same error.

Booted off my backup drive and the machine fired up. Repaired permissions on the primary drive but when I try and repair the drive I get the following messages:

---
Failed

Invalid node structure
Volume check failed

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit.

1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
---

Checked the smart status and this was set as Verified.

I can look at the data (not tried to copy anything off as of yet). I just shut the machine down and went to work.

What is my best course of action to fix this problem? Are there any utilities that I can use to check the drive?

Going to go out today to get a bigger external drive so I can back up anything I can before I start trying to fix things.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Glyn.

 

[mad jew]

Well, it sounds like the drive is failing so firstly try getting all your data backed up from it. You could look at trying to repair it with an app like DiskWarrior, but if I were you I'd simply replace the drive immediately.

 

[IJ Reilly]

A disk error for certain, but I would not assume it's fatal to the hard drive. These are usually logical errors in the HDD directory, not hardware failures. I'd try Disk Warrior first.

 

[CanadaRAM]

Hook up the external
Boot from the OSX DVD
Install OSX onto the external

If it allows you to, try migrating the user from the internal drive during the installation (this may save you time in setting up your user account, but depending on where the damage is in your files, it may fail)

If it fails try dragging your data files over folder by folder, or one by one, to work around the damaged area

THEN use DiskWarrior or another utility to try and repair the disk structure of the internal drive. Although DiskWarrior is extremely reliable, doing any type of repair has a small possibility of doing more damage.

 

[GlynJones]

Bought a USB drive today as I need to get back up and running ASAP. Nobody local sells Firewire drives so I picked up a cheap MyBook 320gig as I've only filled about that on the internal hard drive.

Tried CanadaRAM's suggestion to find that I cannot boot from USB even though it's an Intel iMac .

Currently running SuperSuper! to backup to the MyBook then I'll give Mad Jew and IJ Reilly suggestion of DiskWarrior a try.

Will take a while for the backup but I'll keep you posted.

Will order a MyBook Pro 500gig in the next couple of days and relegate the MyBook to my PC.

Glyn.

 

[mad jew]

Okay, excellent. It's probably a little it extreme of me to suggest ditching the drive so early, but I have a pretty stringent policy that once a drive fails like that in a desktop machine, new ones are cheap enough to be able to replace it immediately, and maybe continue using the old repaired unit as convenient backup, albeit not the only backup. That was a run-on sentence, and I liked it.

 

[GlynJones]

Main drive backed up, ran DiskWarrior and rebooted but it still would not allow logons .

Superduper! Now copying from my 5 week old backup on my firewire drive and then I'll copy iTunes, AppleTV Movies, iPhoto's, EyeTV and documents over when complete. Not a major problem as long as they copy across ok from the USB backup.

It least my backups are quite regular and some content over different machines so hopefully will lose nothing.

To Be Continued....

 

[IJ Reilly]

Did Disk Warrior report any errors, or did it make any repairs?

 

[GlynJones]

Did Disk Warrior report any errors, or did it make any repairs?

Made lots of repairs and no errors. Sounds like whatever is used for signons has got screwed somehow. Is this a system file, perf etc?

Glyn.