[waterbuck]

My particular problem was that my TiBook had its first kernel panic today. After that, all attemps to start the computer resulted in a blinking question mark in the middle of the screen.

I could not boot the computer from Diskwarrior, or from Norton's disk. I could boot it from the OSX system install disk, and ran disk utility. It identified some kind of problems with the b-tree-nodes or something like that.

Drive 10's disk could successfully boot the computer. When I ran Drive 10's diagnostic routine, it came up with an indication of trouble with the directories. It proposed to repair with a new directory. Unlike Diskwarrior (which I've used in the past), Drive 10 does not give you a chance to preview what you will get. Drive 10 did give me some indication that I could lose data, however. Before giving me the choice of accepting or rejecting the repair, it indicated that while my old drive had 17.7 GB of content, the new one would be 14.4 GB (my content is, max, 1 GB, and most of the real work is <200 MB). It indicated that whereas the old drive had 428,000 leaf records, the new one would have 345,504 leaf records. I had no way to tell if I would lose access to the actual data from my work (ie all the Powerpoints and Office documents).

I rejected the repair. My next plan is to try to get the TiBook's hard drive out, and into a firewire enclosure where perhaps we could hook it up to a friend's iMac and evaluate if my data is still there.

My guess is that if my data is intact on the hard drive, I could copy it off, then reformat or something like that. I don't want to just send in the drive or the computer to Applecare right away because that pretty much means the end of my data (at least since I last backed up to CD, which was a month ago, let that be a warning to everyone out there!)....

does anyone know whether I should just go with the recommended Micromat Drive 10 repair to my directory? If I lose 3 gb of content, is that likely or unlikely to include the 1 GB which is my actual data?

does anyone know when Alsoft is coming out with Diskwarrior 3.0, one which is supposed to be Mac OS X native?

I am up a tree and would love any advice....

[chris v]

This same computer has booted off of your Disk Warrior CD in the past, and now it won't? Have you tried booting it with the "C" key held down, or tried booting into open firmware with the CD in the machine? (hold down "option" on boot, you should be presented with a list of viable OS's to chose from)

I'm not sure I'd trust Drive 10.

CV

[Terri]

Get the drive into something that can boot 9 and then run DiskWarrior on it.

Personally I can't wait for DiskWarrior for X to come out. I've already pre-ordered my copy.

[waterbuck]

Hi when you say "get the drive into something that can boot os9" what do you mean?

I so wish that Apple had kindly provided an OS9.2.2 disk when they sent the computer in 8/02, but they did not.

The Diskwarrior we tried, at a service provider on Saturday, is not in my possession but I will buy a copy at Compusa today. Their Diskwarrior could boot my computer and it could NOT find my hard drive, period.

I will try again with that approach before accepting Drive10's proposed and rather ominous rebuilt directory.