I stumbled upon this thread via the magical google search engine, and I chose macrumors, of course, for all the help you've given me for when my mac-savvy boyfriend wasn't in arm's reach and I needed help with a macbook issue.
Anyways, the issue he and I are going through relates rather well with this forum both the "invalid node structure" and 3rd party disk utility repair software.
Onto the story:
The Mac in question is a 2006 24'' Mac that has seen a lot of use, but is very well taken care of. Only one user (my boyfriend), and he does take very swell care of his mac (routine maintenance/updates) and used apple products all his life... so it's not like he's new to the whole program like I am (which is why I usually run to him... hahah!). The only repairs/etc. that have been done to the Mac: a new logicboard (replaced a faulty one) and an installment of upgraded ram by a certified apple technician whom we know personally.
The Mac had been freezing intermittently, and the only way to get it into working order was to force it to reboot. It would seemingly work fine afterward with no ill effects. However, last night we were having some inside joke fun (poking fun at a genre of music) and it froze... we forced a reboot and it came back up, we did a little more surfing and then called it a night after that. At 11 am this morning, he went to his Mac to try to boot it up and it did the "folder w/ ?" thing.
From here he tried a few things. He tried using his first-gen iPod that he's fashioned into a boot disk (it's worked on other macs in the past, trust me.) With no avail, in fear that the iPod had given up the ghost, he tried a regular boot disk. Nothing. Then he tried connecting to a friend's mac. Nada. It wouldn't boot for *anything!*
So we had to resort to opening the mac ourselves. (Not recommended for anyone under apple care, still qualifies for apple care, who doesn't know a lot about opening up their computers, or working on the inside of electronics, particularly computer parts!)
We have a hard drive/sata enclosure already, and the required tools to get INTO the Mac itself, so we fashioned the appropriate static-free workstation and got to work. After getting the hard drive out (500GB seagate barracuda that came factory installed by Apple), we put it in the enclosure and hooked it up to our roomate's Mac.
We have both Tech Tool Pro and Disk Warrior floating around on a usb external drive. We ran the disk utility first. It went nuts. Couldn't verify the drive, we tried to repair it. It came up with the "invalid node structure" error and some other lines I can't remember before I was booted out of the office chair and my significant other took over.
We then tried to look into the disk and saw that most of the file structure, while there, it was missing a *lot* of stuff. All his iTunes music, movies, more importantly, his emails from the last 4 years, work files he's spent 100's of billable hours on. He has had a backup before, but not recently. I dubbed it aggressive spring cleaning, but remembered we had programs to help, and pointed him to this thread.
We ran Tech Tool Pro first. It couldn't even handle doing a surface read of the drive. It *crashed* the program.
So without fiddling more with the program, we moved to Disk Warrior. Our savior. Lots of errors. I could paste the type the report to you, but it's rather long, but basically, someone else said it, it looks to be possibly mechanical/logical. The directory was all messed up, there were numerous errors, but needless to say, Disk Warrior was able to get us (so far) to where we need to be to copy the files we most direly needed (we're just going to nuke the rest). We're not sure if there's a mechanical problem involved in the drive, as it said there were 16 problem sectors/nodes on the disk.
The plan: We're not going to take our chances, as we've bought nearly the same drive (same brand/size/etc., just 1TB instead of 500GB). We're going to nuke the drive after everything's done copying over and install a fresh OS on each hard drive (the problem one, and the new retail one).
WHAT he plans on doing with the old one, not sure. We already have a USB external and a replacement drive for him... lol.
But, that's the plan thus far. Hope this helps people's questions. Put simply: The disk utility couldn't repair what damage there was. It couldn't get precious files that he would've been (and had been) billing his clients for. Now, he has those files again, as well as other vital files that we really didn't want to part with. Well worth the money to get the program. Especially if you can manage to keep it on an external drive/disk and install it on your macs and run it as you need it, like we do.
In our situation, we will probably have to nuke the drive anyways, but as another topic poster mentioned, you may be able to save the drive with this utility, and the normal disk utility can't do it. It can possibly save you from repartitioning and wiping everything clean. If so, that saves you a huge step, and a lot of hassle. If you're like us and have a LOT of very valuable software (and files you create along with that software!) that you accumulate over the years... you can't simply just "nuke" your drive, especially if you've been slightly negligent about your last back-up. And as mentioned, some Apple technicians will simply shrug their shoulders and tell you they have to nuke the drive and start fresh, or replace the drive completely, when it can be saved, and save you resources.
IMO, we do have the time to do it, even if in the last 12 hours he could have been coding a client's website or working on a work file. But we've probably cut the cost of repairing his out-of-Apple-care Mac in third today. And that's being conservative.
Hope this helps.
