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KenDallas · May 12, 2005, 12:53 AM

Greetings all,

I desperately need your help.

Having recently received the Tiger installation DVD I was tempted to install it this evening. I created a sparse image (~20gb) using Disk Utility in Panter and then used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my hard drive to this image. By the time Carbon Copy was done the sparse image file was roughly 32gb.

I proceeded to install Tiger using the Erase & Install option. Once tiger was installed, I connected my external USB drive to verify the size of this image file. Sure enough, everything looked good, the file was there and at 32gb.

The problem arose when I doubled clicked on the file to mount it to I could use the Migration Assistant to move my data into Tiger. I got an error message saying that the image file was not mountable. I looked again in the finder to see the size of the image file and it was reduced to 1008mb.

I AM EXTREMELY NERVOUS. What happened to all my data? Is there any possible way to recover this image file and the data contained within this file? This is very important and I would very much appreciate any and all help you can provide.

Thanks in advance.

CharlesS · May 12, 2005, 01:05 AM

Wow, I don't know what you could do. Why did you use a sparse image? Did you try mounting it in Panther before you did the whole erase&install thing?

I dunno, maybe DriveSavers could help?

KenDallas · May 12, 2005, 01:16 AM

Thanks for the response Charles, I used sparse image because that is what was recommended to me. Yes I did mount the sparse image file under panther to make sure that all the files were copied over. All the apps, data files, iTunes music, 1.5gb worth of emails (in entourage), everything was copied over just fine and looked good. I unmounted the volume and mounted it again to ensure it was saved properly and everything looked good.

Originally Posted by CharlesS

Wow, I don't know what you could do. Why did you use a sparse image? Did you try mounting it in Panther before you did the whole erase&install thing?

I dunno, maybe DriveSavers could help?

workerbee · May 12, 2005, 02:30 AM

Originally Posted by KenDallas

Thanks for the response Charles, I used sparse image because that is what was recommended to me.

I hope that you were not bitten by this Tiger bug seen on Macintouch ... have you tried booting into Panther and opening the sparse image?

alphasubzero949 · May 12, 2005, 02:42 AM

Originally Posted by workerbee

I hope that you were not bitten by this Tiger bug seen on Macintouch ... have you tried booting into Panther and opening the sparse image?

Ouch.

Person Man · May 12, 2005, 07:11 AM

Originally Posted by workerbee

I hope that you were not bitten by this Tiger bug seen on Macintouch ... have you tried booting into Panther and opening the sparse image?

If the image file was reduced in size to 1008 MB, then he was bitten by the bug.

Tyler McAdams · May 12, 2005, 08:13 AM

Please tell me you have a second backup!!!

KenDallas · May 12, 2005, 11:31 AM

Well, seems that I have bitten the bug. Being new to the MAC (freshly switching over from PC) perhaps I should have stuck with Panther and not jumped the gun on Tiger. Being a power user on the PC end I felt comfortable making the switch and followed direction very closely.

Good news and bad news. Bad news first, I do not have a second back up. Good news is that when I go into the Disk Repair utility under tiger and double click on the Sparse Image file, it lists another drive under it with some strage label like "disks2s2"- this file shows 32gb. I am assuming the data is not completely distroyed. Realizing this I ran over to Fry's first thing this morning and purchased a copy of Diskgenius and am told that it may work.

Thought I should provide all of you with an update !!

KenDallas · May 12, 2005, 11:32 AM

Seems like I have been bitten by the bug. How do most people end up baking their systems anyways? Is the concept of Sparse Volume Image a new one?

Originally Posted by workerbee

I hope that you were not bitten by this Tiger bug seen on Macintouch ... have you tried booting into Panther and opening the sparse image?

typoon · May 12, 2005, 12:03 PM

Originally Posted by KenDallas

Seems like I have been bitten by the bug. How do most people end up baking their systems anyways? Is the concept of Sparse Volume Image a new one?

I usually just use my .Mac backup. I back up my photos, iTunes music and purchased music and also my documents as well as Mail and it's settings and also the prefs for my apps.

I also make a dulicate backup to my second Drive by just dragging certain things to this drive for backup.

I've never heard of Sparce Volume Image. .Mac has worked everytime I've done it with no problems. For me that's worth the 100 bucks to renew.

workerbee · 01:09 PM

Originally Posted by KenDallas

Seems like I have been bitten by the bug. How do most people end up baking their systems anyways? Is the concept of Sparse Volume Image a new one?

Sorry to hear that you've been bitten -- what a lousy way to greet a switcher.
Maybe you could try to ask Dave Nanian of shirt-pocket.com whether there's any hope for your sparse disk image -- he seems knowlegdeable, and friendly.

.mac is OK, I guess, for backing up small home folders -- however, my mail alone is over 300MB, so this is not an option. I use LaCie firewire disks (1 at home, 1 at the office), and back up using CCC (for the OS) and Synk (home folder, work partition). I don't keep my work in my home folder so I can do clean installs of new OSs without being forced to back it all up.

Sparse disk is not at all a new concept -- it's simply a disk image file that grows with the data in (on?) it. Its quite useful, which makes this Tiger bug all the worse. What's more, FileVault itself (under Preferences -> Security -- that's where you can encrypt your home directory) is nothing but a cleverly mounted sparse image... which does nothing to calm me down presently, as I use Filevault on my Powerbook. I just hope it won't self-destroy before Apple releases an update.
Oh, and before someone tells me to just turn Filevault off: I can't, tried twice. It just stops with an error message. The disk has 20+GB free, my home is around 1.5GB, so its not lack of space. Somehow those 10.x.0 releases sure seem rushed out the door, with big hulking bugs inside, just waiting to bite.

Don't delete your sparse image just yet -- maybe Apple or someone clever will come up with a way to save your data.

CharlesS · May 12, 2005, 01:50 PM

Originally Posted by KenDallas

Well, seems that I have bitten the bug. Being new to the MAC (freshly switching over from PC) perhaps I should have stuck with Panther and not jumped the gun on Tiger. Being a power user on the PC end I felt comfortable making the switch and followed direction very closely.

Good news and bad news. Bad news first, I do not have a second back up. Good news is that when I go into the Disk Repair utility under tiger and double click on the Sparse Image file, it lists another drive under it with some strage label like "disks2s2"- this file shows 32gb. I am assuming the data is not completely distroyed. Realizing this I ran over to Fry's first thing this morning and purchased a copy of Diskgenius and am told that it may work.

Thought I should provide all of you with an update !!

I've heard some not-so-good things about Drive Genius. I think Data Rescue may be a better bet for your situation, and after that, DiskWarrior.

However, there's one huge, huge benefit that you have when trying to repair a damaged disk image as opposed to a damaged physical disk, and that's that you can back it up. This is what I think I would do before you do anything: When you see that 32 GB partition in Disk Utility, create a disk image from that partition by selecting it in Disk Utility and clicking "New Image". Be sure - and this is really important - to save the image on a disk other than the one that contains the damaged disk image! Otherwise, you will overwrite any recoverable data. Then, you can try to run Data Rescue, DiskWarrior or whatever on the image which you have recovered to your disk, and if it doesn't work, the original image may still be intact. I would save the image as a read/write image, and not as a SPARSE image. I do not and never have trusted SPARSE images. On 10.2, they were documented to be unreliable, and although they are supposed to be reliable enough for use post-10.3, I just don't trust them. Any time a disk image can be automatically resized on the fly by the OS, all it needs is to make one mistake calculating what the size should be and you've got problems...

In the future, to do a full-system backup of the type which you were doing, I would probably just select the hard disk in Disk Utility, click "New Image", and convert to a read-only format such as Compressed. This would take less space on the target disk, and also would be much safer since they disk image would not be able to be changed. Even better, you could upgrade to new versions of OS X using the Archive and Install method instead of erasing the disk, and then even if your backup failed, you would still have all your data.

Good luck...

KenDallas · May 12, 2005, 02:45 PM

Thank you so so so much for all the advice.

I was on the phone with Apple for over an hour and eventually ended up speaking to a product manager. I was told to rinstall panther since the sparse image was created using panther and see if I can access the image. At least this way I could save the data. Well, I am just now getting done installing Panther and no luck. The sparse image when viewed from within the finder remains at 1008mb, and when I try to view it from within Disk Utility it shows the 32gb.

When I try to Repair the disk / Volume from within Disk Utility I get the following error:
Repairing disk for “disk2s2”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Catalog file entry not found for extent
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)

Repair attempted on 1 volume
0 HFS volumes repaired
1 volume could not be repaired

I am hoping this message can shed some light on what the underlying problem might be. I have not yet tried DriveGenius, and taking CharlesSs' advice, I dont think I would. Data on this sparse disk is way too important for me to try something that is not recommended. I will try to get Disk Warrior and see if it is able to save the file.

CharlesS · May 12, 2005, 03:41 PM

Try Data Rescue first. It is available as a shareware download from http://www.prosoft.com, and lets you recover one file before you buy it. This way, you can see if it will work before you spend any money.

Data Rescue also doesn't modify the original disk in any way, unlike all the rest of the utilities, so there's no chance of ruining what chance you have of recovering anything.