[Joshua]

I'm having a world of trouble with my Mac today. The machine bombed while I was doing a search with Sherlock, and when I rebooted I was no longer able to use my main Macintosh HD, and all the files/aliases on the desktop had vanished.

The computer boots just fine from the drive, and using Sherlock and the Apple Menu I can access files from the drive without a problem, but if I try to open (double-click) the drive itself, or do anything that involves listing the directory for the drive, the computer freezes up.

I tried rebuilding the desktop, but it won't let me rebuild the Macintosh HD desktop; I tried zapping the PRAM and it seems to do nothing. When I finally did a Volume Structure Test with a Tech Tool Pro, the drive failed the catalog and allocation tests. I tried to rebuild the drive using Tech Tool Pro, but it was going to reduce me from 2920 folders on the drive to 11, which would mean I'd have roughly 35,000 files in the root directory, rather than divided up into their proper locations.

I'm at a loss at this point as to what to do next. The only thing I can think of is to try to find some way to backup all my files and just reinitialize the drive, but I'd like to avoid that if possible.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Josh

[Cipher13]

Try DiskWarrior to get your disk back to normal... it does a better job than TechTool.
But... you're gonna have to format that to get it back to normal
Sorry...

Cipher13

[Joshua]

I ended up backing up what I could and formatting, and everything seems to be back to normal now. Does anyone have any idea what causes the catalog to be corrupted? I'd definitely like to avoid it in the future if at all possible...

Josh

[reader50]

Most directory damage is caused by a system crash. Application crashes often corrupt their own preference files, that is why throwing out preference files is a common answer to problems. A system crash while writing to the HD almost guarantees that the HD will be left in an incomplete state.

Turning your Mac off by unplugging it will do the same thing if your Mac is writing to disk at the time. Always shut down properly via the menus if you can. If you can't, run Disk First Aid or other utility right afterwards. The more you use a damaged disk, generally the worse it is going to get.