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kman42 · Sep 1, 2006, 06:41 PM

If my wife logs in, she gets the spinning beach ball within a minute, even if there are no applications running (shift held down on login). I can log into my account no problem. I tried to run Disk First Aid from the Tiger CD, but it results in the following errors:

invalid key length
volume check failed

Error: the underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
1 Volume could not be repaired because of an error.

Any ideas? Should I clone the drive and reformat it or will that just result in the same problem? I have our user accounts backed up, but it seems like a pain to go that route. Best cloning software?

thanks,
kman

kman42 · Sep 1, 2006, 09:20 PM

I am making a Carbon Copy Cloner clone of my drive. I then plan to reformat my startup drive and copy it back. Should that work okay? This seems to be what these cloning programs are for, but I have never used one.

kman

goMac · Sep 2, 2006, 02:13 AM

Originally Posted by kman42

I am making a Carbon Copy Cloner clone of my drive. I then plan to reformat my startup drive and copy it back. Should that work okay? This seems to be what these cloning programs are for, but I have never used one.

kman

I'm not sure cloning will work too hot when it sounds like portions of your partition may be unreachable. You're probably going to need something a bit heavier, like Diskwarrior.

Tsilou B. · Sep 2, 2006, 08:42 AM

Do it differently: Make the clone on another partition or external hard drive, then try to boot from the clone first. If you cannot boot from the clone because system files are missing or damaged, do an "Archive and Install" from the Tiger CD to the clone. Then look if everything's ok on the clone. If some (important) files are missing, you still have the original disk and you can try to restore the files using special utilities. Otherwise, format your drive and copy the working clone back.

kman42 · Sep 2, 2006, 11:16 AM

Well, I have an external drive with my backups on it, but there is only one partition. I made the clone to a disk image on that drive, but that obviously won't boot. Any other options short of buying a new disk? I was going to pick up a copy of Disk Warrior this morning and see if it can fix the errors.

Does it sound like my drive is actually failing? Disk Utility says that SMART 'verified'. Isn't that a measure of physical drive health? If my drive is actually on the fritz I might just follow a route to replacing it.

kman

Tsilou B. · Sep 3, 2006, 11:48 AM

If the external drive is a Firewire drive (or you have an Intel Mac), so that you can theoretically boot from the external HD, then just move everything on the external disk to a folder called "Backups" and then "Carbon Copy Clone" your internal drive directly to the external drive. Be sure to uncheck the "delete target drive first" option. Then, after you have checked that the clone works (see above), you can format your internal drive with Disk Utility. Select "Security Options" and check "Zero out data". That way, Mac OS X will find bad blocks if there are any. (In that case buy a new disk.)
Finally, use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the external drive back to the internal drive, but deselect the "Backups" folder, so that it won't be copied.

kman42 · Sep 3, 2006, 12:58 PM

I went out and bought a new 200gb SATA drive and installed it yesterday. I have managed to get OSX and our user accounts recovered from our Backup data. The next task is installing applications and reconfiguring our shared info (itunes, iphoto) to work again. So far, so good though.

I'm planning to zero the old drive and see how it goes. Will Disk Util tell me if it encounters bad blocks when doing this? Is there another utility that can do a reasonable check on the drive? I'm thinking of using it as a clone of my new drive, while still maintaining my normal backup schedule to my external drive. This would allow me to more easily reinstall if things go awry.

kman