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CambAngst · Dec 11, 2004, 05:58 PM

I suffered a pretty massive hard drive crash yesterday morning. My computer wouldn't boot past the grey apple screen. The TechTool Deluxe version on my AppleCare CD couldn't fix the problem (Volume Structure error).

I got a copy of DiskWarrior and booted from the CD. I ran the Rebuild and everything was proceeding nicely until it hit "Step 9: Recording any file or folder differences." It shows "7,477,820 tests..." and the blue bar has been sitting in about the same place for the past 2 hours. My system volume is a 250 GB SATA drive and my computer is a Dual 2.0 G5 with 2.5 GB of RAM.

My question is, should this step take this long? I still have a normal cursor, no beach ball of death or anything. Not sure whether to try to skip this step or just ride it out. Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

ChrisF · Dec 11, 2004, 06:45 PM

On a seriously hosed disk, DiskWarrior can take many many hours- I've heard stories of 9 or more. I'll assume you're using the most recent, 3.0.2, because it is faster than previous versions, but can still take a really long time if your disk needs a lot of repair.
Chris

yukon · Dec 11, 2004, 07:38 PM

Ride it out. 250gb is a lot of space to go through today, certain operations on a drive that big take forever. I'd advise that, if possible, copy what it recovers to another disk, then reformat the original. Install a new system and replace things like programs with newly downloaded copies, then copy over your old files. Use TechTool to check the SMART status, I see that one of my drives is about to fail one of the tests, yay.

CambAngst · Dec 11, 2004, 08:09 PM

Thanks for the info.

DiskWarrior has confirmed that the drive is hosed beyond hosed.

"The new directory cannot replace the original directory because the original directory was too severely damaged."

Thankfully, I have a second internal hard drive. I'm copying everything I can over to it at the moment.

yukon · Dec 11, 2004, 10:53 PM

If copying a specific file fails, at times you can narrow it down to the file and skip copying it. Dunno if any drives can still be set to read only through jumpers, just in case something tries changing anything on the drive that could ruin chances for recovering files.

Personally, I'm waiting for a reply from Seagate at the moment, not sure if this puts a damper on my plans to buy the 7200.8, I'm hearing good things about Hitachi.

typoon · Dec 12, 2004, 06:46 AM

If you have data on the drive you might want to try Data Rescue and File Salvage. Either or both are pretty good. I used both and recovered 3/4th of he info on a customer's computer that had a hosed HD. After that see if you can refformat the drive. If not you will probably need to get it replaced.

CambAngst · Dec 12, 2004, 07:02 AM

One strange thing that came up while salvaging files with DiskWarrior was that certain files couldn't be copied because, according to the software, I didn't have sufficient permissions. I thought that was pretty strange, considering that I had booted from the CD and I could get at individual files in every user folder. The files I "didn't have permissions" for were mainly older files that I had imported to the G5 the last time I upgraded computers.

typoon · Dec 12, 2004, 07:04 AM

Originally posted by CambAngst:
One strange thing that came up while salvaging files with DiskWarrior was that certain files couldn't be copied because, according to the software, I didn't have sufficient permissions. I thought that was pretty strange, considering that I had booted from the CD and I could get at individual files in every user folder. The files I "didn't have permissions" for were mainly older files that I had imported to the G5 the last time I upgraded computers.

this is probably because if you boot from a CD it is a locked media and also it has different permissions from what is set for your machine. I don't think DiskWarrior has Admin privs.