My 7 month old 667MHz G4 TiBook had its first kernel panic today and on attempting to restart, the computer displayed a flashing question mark alternating with a picture of a folder, ie it could not find the hard drive.
With Applecare on the phone we booted off the OSX install 1 disk and ran disk utility, which identified some directory problem of some kind. It offered to repair, reported having repaired, but then re-running the utility again showed the same problem and the computer could not boot up.
I took said computer to a local apple-authorized dealer where they could not boot the computer at all off of Norton Utilities. They could boot it off their DiskWarrior disk, but that disk could not find/identify or mount my hard drive, so we could not run DW on it.
they then put in Drive 10 which found the disk. It ran a diagnostic evaluation, which highlighted directory problems and b-tree node issues, offering to attempt a repair.
I ran the "attempt repair" procedure (took 90 minutes). Drive 10 gives you an option to accept or reject the repair at the end of its little procedure. While it doesn't permit any kind of preview of the rebuilt directory , it does offer a profile of the differences between the old existing and presumably faulty directory and the new one. In my case it highlighted, in red, some 'unusual' differences. Specifically, while the old drectory had 173,123 total files, the rebuilt directory would have 149,010 files. While the old volume content was apparently 17.7 GB, the new volume content would be 14.4 GB (I don't know what would be lost; my actual 'data' in terms of workfiles and music and stuff topped out around 1.1 GB). While the old directory had 545 free nodes, the rebuilt directry would offer 7526 free nodes. While the old B-tree would offer 46 'used nodes', the rebuilt b-tree would offer 30 'used nodes'.
Not knowing whether I would lose my real data from this change (ie all that I had failed to back up in the last 3 weeks or so), I declined the rebuilt directory. I am left with a computer that I cannot use.
I am really curious if anyone knows what to do in this kind of situation. I gather that AppleCare, if the local shop on Monday says 'it is a drive problem,' then they will take my computer and probably put in a new drive. But since Drive10 seemed to be able to do something with this drive, perhaps it is something more subtle than mechanical failure.
Since tomorrow is Sunday and the computer store is closed, a Mac-savvy friend who knows Tibooks offered to take out the hard drive and mount it in a firewire enclosure and see if we could hook it up to his iMac. The thought was to try to rescue all the data we can, and if this procedure works, we could posit that the problem is not so much the drive itself but something concerning how the TiBook is relating to the drive. But at least I would have as much data to work with.
Has anyone here used Drive10 and made a similar decision concerning the proposed 'rebuilt directory'? Did you lose a lot of data?
Does anyone think Diskwarrior 3.0 is out already? I have seen nothing to suggest that it is.
Do you think that this is more than just a directory issue but somehow speaks to some underlying hardware problem?
Any advice I can get is much appreciated.
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