Macintosh HD Corrupt (Disk Utility - Invalid Directory Item Count

[GWG8803]

Hey guys, hope all is well. Long-time reader, first-time poster.

Ran into a problem with an abrupt shutdown twice while I was re-starting my suddenly slow Macbook Pro (OS X Yosemite, 10.10). I ran Disk Utility, and I got this error message:

"Invalid directory item count
(It should be 5510 instead of 5511)
The volume Macintosh HD was found corrupt and needs to be repaired/
Error: This disk needs to be repaired using the Recovery HD. Restart your computer, holding down the Command key and the R key until you see the Apple logo. When the OS X Utilities window appears, choose Disk Utility."​

I booted into Recovery HD, and ran Disk Utility there. Both the Macintosh HD & the OS came back clean with no errors (that's after verifying and repairing disk & permissions). Booting again normally, I still get the same error message above when I run Disk Utility, however, the "it should be _ instead of _" numbers sometimes change. Going back into Recovery HD again tells me I'm clean.

I have not encountered the reboot issue (or any other issue for that matter) since the initial one -- essentially, it's saying the Macintosh HD is corrupt on a fully-functioning MBP. Just spitballing, but could it be the beginning of the hard drive failing or something?

If anyone has any thoughts or advice, I'd greatly appreciate it.

Cheers,


Marc

 

[GWG8803]

For anyone curious/having the same problem, I believe it's been fixed.

Apparently, Disk Utility's report in Recovery does not always match what Disk Utility reads when the hard drive is mounted. I used "FSCK" from Single User Mode found here. Once there, the problem was identified and fixed, then re-run without issue.

 

[pcwight2]

Thank you so much for posting this GWG8803. Following the guidelines you provided I was able to recover 125 GB of memory that had been unavailable ever since I uninstalled a virtual windows 7 machine using the Boot camp assistant back in early 2015. Thanks to your advice I just doubled the memory storage on my macbook air! Awesome.

 

[deome]

Thank you so much for sharing this!! You saved me!!