Trouble Starting and Disk Repair Endlessly Looping?

[brandondearman]

Hello all,

Despite my best efforts of searching over the past few weeks, I have been unable to find this trouble that I am having:

My wife's MacBook ('05-'06? with Intel) running Tiger isn't starting up. It gets stuck on the loading circle on the apple logo screen. I have followed advice found on other forums: run from the startup disk and check disk by running Disk Repair. The full error is listed at the bottom of this post for reference.

Essentially, Disk Repair shows SMART status = Verified, but keeps rechecking and repairing endlessly. I assume this is not good. I've successfully learned how to backup files to an external hard drive via terminal, so wiping the drive clean to start over is a possibility, but wanted to exhaust all other options before trying this option.

Aside from erasing the disk and starting over or purchasing something like DiskWarrior, do I have any other options at this point?

Thanks for any help or advice!!

----------

Sorry, here is what Disk Repair says:

"Verify and Repair disk "Macintosh HD"
Checking HFS Plus volume
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Incorrect number of thread records
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Invalid volume directory count
(it should be 198387 instead of 198363)
Invalid volume file count
(it should be 912919 instead of 912824)
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Repairing volume.
Rechecking volume."

 

[cheesygrin]

Unfortunately, this sounds very much like a failed or failing drive. There is an outside chance that it could be a file system error, so a wipe may be worth a shot, but the most likely thing is that it is new hard drive time.

When it comes to a dodgy drive, there's no point messing around trying to fix it: drives do fail eventually and the machine will never run correctly until it is replaced.

 

[brandondearman]

Thanks for the reply cheesygrin. That's what I was thinking would be the case. I've zeroed out the drive, and I'm trying to reinstall to see if I have any luck. I'll keep this post updated for future reference in case anyone else sees my same issue.

 

[BrianBaughn]

The looping action is weird and uncommon, I think.

I believe those errors are the kind that DiskWarrior can sometimes rectify by rebuilding the drive's directory.

Erasing and starting over, as you're doing, would be as good or better than using DiskWarrior...and it's free. However, there could be bad blocks on the drive that neither DW nor Disk Utility will detect. In that case, problems will pop up again in the future.