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Kristoff · Oct 22, 2005, 02:23 PM

FYI: there is a kick ass little utility called AppleJack that just saved my ass--so I thought I'd share the experience.

When I got back from vacation, I tried to boot my mac and it hung for like 20 minutes.
So, I had to power it off and rebooted to verbose mode and watched it go through fsck fixing all the errors.

Everything seems ok, except it would hang whenever I used something that relied on SyncServer (mail.app, ical, isync, address book, safari, etc).

It would hang for 2 minutes--hard. complete coma.
Then, in the system.log, I would see SyncServer not available and Disk I/O error or timeout messages.

So, I ran Disk Utility, and Disk Warrior, both said the disk was fine. SMART status normal. Apple Hardware Test passed all.

So, I created a new user account and it worked fine.
So, I tried trashing all my preferences and suchlike to no avail.

I spent a couple hours a day for 3 days trying to debug what the issue was. I read everything I could about SyncServer, etc, etc (including the Angry Bees Tech Note from Apple

) and no matter what I tried, I couldn't get that user account to not hang all the time.

On a whim, I ran applejack.
I don't know whether it was the Verify Preferences or Clear Caches option, but one of them totally fixed the problem. No more hangs, no more errors in the log, and all SyncServices hooks are working fine.

I was seriously dreading the thought of having to make a new user account and trying to migrate all that crap over and dealing with permissions and ownership issues.

So, thanks to applejack, and if you ever have odd behaviors that can't be explained...give it a shot.

jmiddel · Oct 22, 2005, 03:42 PM

I agree that is a must have, plus it is free! Thanks you folks who created this. Come to think of it, Apple should have it pre-installed, after all, if you're needing single user mode, might as well do all the stuff it does at one pass, not just fsck.

CharlesS · Oct 22, 2005, 04:20 PM

I hate to say this, but if you're getting Disk I/O errors, your problem may be greater than you think it is. It could be that some preference file or cache file was sitting on a bad block, and deleting it caused it to be rebuilt somewhere, but the bad blocks may still be on the drive.

The thing is, DiskWarrior and Disk Utility, while excellent, do not do bad block scans. The reason is because bad blocks scans take a long time. Currently, the only utilities that scan for bad blocks that I know of are TechTool Pro and Drive Genius (anyone know of any free/UNIX ones?). If you've still got bad blocks on the drive, another file could land on top of one in the future, and maybe that time it would be an important document. Also, it could be an indication that your drive is going to fail, which is worse...

Kristoff · Oct 22, 2005, 04:49 PM

CharlesS.....

I think that some file key to SyncServer was somehow crosslinked when I did the very first FSCK.
And from there, it just couldn't handle it.

The drive is a 6 month old WD Raptor--I would be shocked if it developed bad blocks at this stage in the game. Just the same, I am going to CCC the drive, and do a reformat with zeros to have any bad blocks marked out.

I still think the Disk I/O timeouts were just that the file was crosslinked and the SyncServer couldn't read it in--at least that's what I'm hoping.

Anyway....the moral is that Applejack has at least gotten me back up with a usable OS.
I will give TechTool Pro a shot, and like I said, I am going to re-zero the drive as a precaution.

CharlesS · Oct 22, 2005, 04:54 PM

No, I think if the files were crosslinked, then Disk Utility and DiskWarrior would definitely have noticed it and not said the disk was OK. Things like crosslinked files are things that DU and DW are designed to detect, whereas bad blocks are not. EIther way, I'd definitely look into it. I knew a girl once who had a PowerBook that was less than a year old and whose hard drive developed some bad sectors, so it does happen...

- - e r i k - - · Oct 23, 2005, 09:31 AM

A link in the first post might have been nice

nod · Jan 5, 2006, 03:59 PM

I'm having the exact same issues as the orignal poster. I'll try Applejack this evening. Just to follow-up, if the original poster is still around: did using Applejack permanently fix your issue?

tooki · Jan 5, 2006, 04:03 PM

Originally Posted by CharlesS

No, I think if the files were crosslinked, then Disk Utility and DiskWarrior would definitely have noticed it and not said the disk was OK. Things like crosslinked files are things that DU and DW are designed to detect, whereas bad blocks are not. EIther way, I'd definitely look into it. I knew a girl once who had a PowerBook that was less than a year old and whose hard drive developed some bad sectors, so it does happen...

It happened on my AlBook after about a year. Apple replaced the hard disk.

tooki

rickey939 · Jan 5, 2006, 04:26 PM

More kudos to AppleJack...awesome utility.

nod · Jan 6, 2006, 11:27 AM

OK. I started AppleJack 1.4.2 last night about 8pm. It's been repairing permissions for over 12 hours now... Is that normal? It's showing progress with the little dots, but still. This is with OSX 10.4.3.

Anybody?

rickey939 · Jan 6, 2006, 03:42 PM

Originally Posted by nod

OK. I started AppleJack 1.4.2 last night about 8pm. It's been repairing permissions for over 12 hours now... Is that normal? It's showing progress with the little dots, but still. This is with OSX 10.4.3.

Anybody?

That sounds a little off to me...hmm, can you quit and try it again?

Hal Itosis · Jan 6, 2006, 06:50 PM

Originally Posted by nod

OK. I started AppleJack 1.4.2 last night about 8pm. It's been repairing permissions for over 12 hours now... Is that normal? It's showing progress with the little dots, but still. This is with OSX 10.4.3. Anybody?

Well, same thing happens without AppleJack:

-boot into SU mode
-run /sbin/fsck -fy
-enter /sbin/mount -uw /
-and then diskutil repairPermissions /

There's quite a hang at that point...

CharlesS · Jan 6, 2006, 08:29 PM

Well, in 10.3, simply running diskutil from single-user mode never worked unless you started the Mach bootstrap servers and the SecurityServer before diskutil would work properly. In 10.4, they fixed that, but who knows, maybe one of the updates has messed it up again.

In any case, you could try the commands I posted here and see if it makes a difference.

12 hours is way too long for the Repair Permissions script. It shouldn't take that long unless you have a ton of files, since it really doesn't do all that much...

nod · Jan 6, 2006, 08:41 PM

Thanks for the replies guys. I had to hard reboot to get out of it. I ran AJ again and it ran all the way through in under 10 minutes. That's the good news. The bad news is it didn't solve my problem, which is much like the original poster's.