[aquentinjones]

I have a newish macbook 2.1 with a 120 Gb hitachi HDD and 2Gb of Ram.
The system failed to start and when i had installed leopard onto an external usb disk the disk utility gave for my internal HDD in red:

invalid B-tree node size
volume check failed
error file system verify or repair failed.

needless to say there were things on the internal HDD that i had not properly backed up and i still hoped i could rescue them perhaps using fsck ?

If not i suppose i erase my internal HDD and reinstall.
has anyone any suggestions please?

[amazing]

Do you have access to another Mac? Because you should try mounting the MB in firewire-target-disk-mode (FTD), which sometimes does wonders in allowing you to recover data.

How to use FireWire target disk mode

Another alternative would be if you had a bootable external drive, usually firewire. You could startup off that and see what can be seen on the internal drive.

[aquentinjones]

Thanks for such a prompt reply amazing.
Yes I have an old fire wire external disk full of useless back ups of things that i dont know if i will ever need [is it just me that is so chaotic in backing things up ? They are never of vital importance so I never have a disciplined attitude to backing them up ] Anyway i digress.
So I will try and clear enough space on this firewire disk and the i suppose i must create a small partition for the new version of leopard stripped [like a tiger or no that is striped ;=} ] as i was saying; stripped of all the unnecessary printer drivers and fonts to save time installing and space.
Then am I to assume that this mayl give me a better access to repairing the original internal hitachi HDD than the usb drive did?

I am unable currently to find another mac; am afraid that for the next monthj I am isolated on a tiny island [Siquijor } in the phillipinnes, with a 90ft tower in the garden for internet where pcs are found but I have found no macs or mac know how.

I was hoping someone will tell me a magic string that I can use with fsck in terminal mode to force it to repair the internal HDD which i cannot find anywhere except with disk utility.
anyway thanks.

[JKT]

Disk Utility is just a GUI for fsck so running fsck is not going to help much if DU isn't doing anything, unfortunately (it is possible that you could add flags to try and force it to fix things, but that could cause more problems than it solves). However, for a B-tree node error, your best bet is to get hold of Disk Warrior if you can. It isn't guaranteed to solve the problem, but it will do a much better job of it than Disk Utility/fsck will.

[Big Mac]

You need something stronger than DIsk Utility to try to repair an error like that.

[EricTheRed]

Originally Posted by aquentinjones 

I have a newish macbook 2.1 with a 120 Gb hitachi HDD and 2Gb of Ram.
The system failed to start and when i had installed leopard onto an external usb disk the disk utility gave for my internal HDD in red:

invalid B-tree node size
volume check failed
error file system verify or repair failed.

needless to say there were things on the internal HDD that i had not properly backed up and i still hoped i could rescue them perhaps using fsck ?

If not i suppose i erase my internal HDD and reinstall.
has anyone any suggestions please?

Start your mac and immediately hold down Command-S

Welcome to single user mode. After every command, hit return.

type

df

take note of what your internal HDD's name is

it'll be something like /dev/disk0s2 or /dev/disk1s2

Now type

fsck_hfs -r <name of your internal HDD>

in other words, something like,

fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk0s2

Watch the show.

If it reports problems where fixed, run the command again.

When finished type

reboot

This last command will restart your Mac as a Mac.

[Rob F]

My 250Gb LaCie got a power interrupt during a backup; now I get:

Invalid B-tree node size

So I tried this:

fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk1s6
** /dev/rdisk1s6
** Checking Non-journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
(4, 0)
** Volume check failed.

As you can see, it's still not working.

The computer the LaCie was connected to was an 2.4Gh iMac.

Any help appreciated!

Thanx!!!

[fisherKing]

Originally Posted by Rob F 

My 250Gb LaCie got a power interrupt during a backup; now I get:

Invalid B-tree node size

So I tried this:

fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk1s6
** /dev/rdisk1s6
** Checking Non-journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
(4, 0)
** Volume check failed.

As you can see, it's still not working.

The computer the LaCie was connected to was an 2.4Gh iMac.

Any help appreciated!

Thanx!!!

diskwarrior..........