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You are here: MacNN Forums > Hardware - Troubleshooting and Discussion > Mac Desktops > Disk Utility says no errors but Diskwarrior disagrees

Disk Utility says no errors but Diskwarrior disagrees
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Jan 11, 2006, 10:21 AM
 
Need some advice. I ran Disk Utility yesterday to verify my drives before upgrading to 10.4.4 on my Dual 2GHz. It came up with some errors but said it couldn't fix them. Went to Diskwarrior which also said it couldn't fix it. Did a safe boot which is supposed to force an 'fsck' but the system never fully booted from that, probably failed at the fsck (the fans turned on full blast at the grey bootup screen then eventually powered off by itself). When I rebooted, I ran Disk Utility and it now reports the drive is fine. Diskwarrior still scoffs at that though.

Disk Utility said something about File Allocation Table mismatch.
Diskwarrior said the directory structure could not be repaired.
SMART says the drive is fine.
TechTool Pro reports a Bitmap mismatch and could not repair the drive.

Thing is, I don't see any problems with the drive at all. System boots fine and there are no corrupt files. It's a 3 month old 300GB Seagate so I don't think it's a hardware problem. But I've had some kernel panics related to my video iPod (the one where the G5 kernel panics if you have low space left on the iPod) which is where I'm guessing this all started from.

I've left it for now with Retrospect backing up the drive to a new external 250GB drive I had to buy just for this. I was planning on formatting the problem drive, testing it again and then restoring the Retrospect backup. (The only issue I've had with Retrospect is I Duplicated the problem drive to that new drive and had about 4000 files with different dates. I'm hoping that doesn't happen using the Backup function instead.)

Is this the right path? Or anybody think it could be a hardware issue? I've never done a full system volume backup with Retrospect, will I run into problems making the restored drive bootable again? And last, are there any other programs I should try?

BTW, I thought Journaling was supposed to fix all this!!
     
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Jan 11, 2006, 12:03 PM
 
Journaling just reduces the chance of corruption. In case of doubt, I would trust DiskWarrior. Fix your driver with DiskWarrior and then check with the other tools again. Even if you don't have trouble with your drive now, there is not guarantee it will remain that way.

If you can't fix it this way, then zero the drive and restore your data in case you run into trouble.
(Last edited by OreoCookie; Jan 11, 2006 at 12:09 PM. )
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
     
cmoney  (op)
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Jan 11, 2006, 05:11 PM
 
Argh I got home and looks like Retrospect gave a Cyclic Redunancy error about 20 minutes after I started the back up and left for work. Guess there really is corruption then.
     
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Jan 11, 2006, 06:08 PM
 
You don't mention the version of Diskwarrior you are using. After several months of using Disk Warrior 3.02 on OS X 10.4.3 I discovered they were not compatible. The process to isolate this took me an awful long time to figure out. Maybe the worst part was the machines kept chugging along 'as if all was well', but they would slowly degrade by the day- as if a ghost came along every week and started playing rascally tricks. Using Applejack and repairing permissions weekly kept me limping along...

I just solved the problem two weeks ago and finally have a clean machine running right! No wonder then, I am hesitating to use any of the 'repair tools' on 10.4.4 until I am sure they are FORWARD compatible.

Which begs the question: Why is there no ONE CENTRAL website or database to check for OS X compatibility?
     
   
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