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soundstruck · Aug 10, 2005, 09:12 AM

My 3 week old powerbook won't boot up anymore. When I boot to the OSX Installer CD and run the Disk Utility's "Verify & Repair" functions, it says that my "Macintosh HD" volume has an invalid node structure. When it gets around to rebuilding the catalog B-tree, it says the "Macintosh HD" volume can't be repaired, with little more detail than that.

So I'm trying to figure out at this point, if my actual hard drive is going, and if there's any way of recovering data that's on the screwed up volume. I'm sure this has been covered a few times before, but I'm really having trouble finding anything useful on a forum search. Could someone please help me out by going over...

A) What are my options for data recovery?
B) How can I find out if the hard drive has physical problems (short of trying to erase and restore the volume), so that I spend less time trying to fix this, and more time just hauling it down to the Apple reseller in town and having the hard drive replaced. (Can they even do that? Does it have to get sent away to Apple for something as small as an HD replacement?)

If you can either provide me with links to different threads that have already addressed these issues so that I can read and search those... or if you could briefly reply to this thread with things-to-try, I'd hugely appreciate it, and throw tons of good Karma your way. I lost my first powerbook last month after having it for just over a year and a half... and now =this=. Any help, again, would be awesome.

Warmest regards,

:: marc

TETENAL · Aug 10, 2005, 09:34 AM

A)
You can connect your PowerBook to another Mac with a Firewire cable and boot the PowerBook in Target Disk Mode (hold down T while booting). The other Mac will then see the PowerBook as a regular external hard disk and you might be able to retrieve the data from it.
You can also try third party disk repair software (I have know knowledge about these since I never needed it – DiskWarrior is one mentioned often I believe).

B)
When you select the drive (not the volume) in Disk Utility and press the Info button, a S.M.A.R.T.-status other than "verified" means that the drive is failing (the other way around you can not tell absolutely sure though).

Big Mac · Aug 10, 2005, 10:05 AM

Your drive is most likely not physically damaged. Buy a copy of Disk Warrior, which is the best disk recovery software around. Prior to running it, you should confirm your disk's S.M.A.R.T. status as Tetenal advises. (For the sake of accuracy, however, I must note that some functioning internal drives may not show their S.M.A.R.T. status, displaying a "not supported" status message instead.)

soundstruck · Aug 10, 2005, 10:24 AM

Thanks Tetenal and Big Mac, I do actually have a G4 tower that could be used for that purpose. I also have an external firewire drive with something like 100gb of free space, and was wondering if there's any way I can make an exact image of my damaged powerbook volume on my firewire disk, so that I can repair it at a later date if necessary.

You're right though, watching the disk's SMART status is something to look out for. But is there no other way to do a surface test of the disk, much like you can with the ScanDisk utility included with microsoft's old version of DOS? Is this something that DiskWarrior will take care of?

Thanks again for taking the time to respond to this question.

outsourced · Aug 10, 2005, 10:26 AM

TechTool Pro is useful for fixing that type of error also.
http://www.micromat.com/tt_pro_4/tt_pro_4.html

Whatever you do, though: Do not use any NORTON utilities.

bbales · Aug 10, 2005, 01:17 PM

If the PB is only three weeks old, you ARE taking it back to Apple, aren't you?

BYW, I second the DiskWarrior recommendation.

soundstruck · Aug 10, 2005, 07:48 PM

bbales, i was wrong. the laptop is thirteen days old. also, the idea would be to *recover* my data, *then* take it in for servicing. chances are they won't fix the one dead pixel on my display, but at least I'll have a working computer again. Thirteen days might not seem like a lot of data to have lost, but trust me, it was.

Having dropped $130+tax on DiskWarrior this afternoon, it's now been trying to locate and rebuild files for over an hour now. The product has at least been nice enough to tell me "speed inhibited by disk malfunction", but it doesn't look like it's getting anywhere according to the progress bar. The SMART test "passed", so that's obviously no help at all. I'll let it run overnight, what the hell.

Thanks for all your help guys. No idea what the heck went wrong with this one.