What is an "invalid sibling link" ?

[Dunnart]

Help needed please. I'm running a 24" iMac, 500gb HD, 2 gb RAM.

When trying to start Aperture the other day it hung up requiring a forced quit. When I went into disk utility to check the "Macintosh HD" volume, Verify disk failed with the error message - "invalid sibling link" and stops. The same happens when I run Disk repair.

I can't find anything on the Apple tech support about this.

Its happened once before and Apple suppport made me completely reformat my hard drive and reload programs - a major drag !

Have I got a dodgy hard drive ?

Any ideas and educated guesses welcome.

Thanks

Steve

 

[janey]

hmm, without using complex terms...basically, the filesystem on your drive (not the drive itself) is off in some way that Mac OS X doesn't like. disk utility really blows at fixing these kinds of issues. you'll need a better disk utility app to fix them, although I'm short on recommendations (I think they all suck...).

If you find an appropriate utility to fix the issue, a reformat should not be necessary (although with a lack of such a utility, this is probably necessary...)

 

[AdeFowler]

janey's right but Disk Warrior would be a good option.

In the meantime, restart and run fsck. See:

http://www.osxfaq.com/dailytips/07-2002/07-31.ws

Good luck!

 

[Sun Baked]

Messed up the file system/catalog.

Must use Disk Utility from the DVD -- the Disk Repair/Verify doesn't work from the HD, since open files tend to cause problems.

Also if Disk First Aid doesn't work from the HD, booting in Single User mode (command-s on boot and type reboot on the command line to restart the machine and running fsck) and running fsck might work.

Remember Disk First Aid (disk utility/first aid) and fsck are both multi pass programs -- may have to run them several times to repair everything.

---

If this fixes the file system/catalog problems, you may want to look at running update prebinding.

www.apple.com/support search update prebinding or fsck.

EDIT: can be caused by the machine crashing (software conflict problem), a bad drive, or bad 3rd party memory.

 

[Dunnart]

Thanks for the advice guys

Thanks Janey, Southern Boy and Sun Baked for the quick and helpful replies.

I'm going to run fsck, but I've also just ordered a copy of Disk Warrior 4 which should arrive early next week.

I thought I was going to see the end of this sort of 'puter maintenance when I switched from PC - "and so it goes" sigh !

My iMac hangs on shutdown fairly regularly as well, so maybe the two problems are related and will both be fixed at the same time.

cheers

Steve

 

[Sun Baked]

TMy iMac hangs on shutdown fairly regularly as well, so maybe the two problems are related and will both be fixed at the same time.

cheers

Steve

The problem with the hangs, is that since Mac OS X is not real time so a lot of the file saves are not done "immediately", just like you may have noticed on the responses to mouse clicks -- so a bung of system hangs could lead you down the path to a corrupted file system.

Taking a look at the panic log may also point you to a problem, as long as the OS kept running long enough during the crash.

 

[Dunnart]

The problem with the hangs, is that since Mac OS X is not real time so a lot of the file saves are not done "immediately", just like you may have noticed on the responses to mouse clicks -- so a bung of system hangs could lead you down the path to a corrupted file system.

Taking a look at the panic log may also point you to a problem, as long as the OS kept running long enough during the crash.

Mmm.. I didn't realise the first point.

Thats a good idea - could you please tell me where I find the panic log ?

thanks

Steve

 

[Dunnart]

update

Well I installed and ran Disk Warrior last night and it cleared up a whole pile of things which Disk Repair hadn't dealt with and my Macintosh HD volume now appears fixed. Unfortunatly, I'm still not able to load Aperture so I guess I'll have to reload it and see if that helps. Its gotta be better than reloading OSX like I did last time.

cheers

Steve