My new MacPro is playing up and the old Nortons used to sort out a few problems. With Disk Utility I’m getting as an error message:
Disk Utility stopped verifying “Macintosh HD” because the following error was encountered:
Filesystem verify or repair failed.
And in the Utility display window:
Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Performing live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file counte
(It should be 305380 instead of 305394)
Invalid volume directory counte
(It should be 65715 instead of 65701)
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
Performing live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Invalid volume file counte
(It should be 305380 instead of 305394)
Invalid volume directory counte
(It should be 65715 instead of 65701)
The volume Macintosh HD needs to be repaired.
(Norton Utilities finally died or was killed, and it was long overdue when it happened. Poor design of the program allowed it to wreck more disks than it was fixing in the end. Some very basic defensive coding would have prevented it from trying to work on disks that it didn’t know how to fix.)
Definitely. Also get ProSoft Data Rescue II. If you have a disk
that’s in a bad way it is MUCH wiser to spend what might be your
last-gasp chance of getting data off - and only THEN try repairing
the disk.
In my experience (which includes multiple in-depth disk utility labs
features for MacUser) even the best tool can fail on a problem that
another can solve. If you have the budget, get more than one. This is
not just an abstract ‘wish-list’ recommendation; I keep multiple
utilities handy, and each one has proved their worth at least once.
The best disk repair tools:
Alsoft DiskWarrior
ProSoft Drive Genius
The best data recovery tools:
ProSoft Data Rescue II
SubRosaSoft File Salvage
Seriously though, Norton Utilities went from useful to dangerous MANY
years ago. I’ve even used it to damage the data structure of disks
in a repeatable fashion for other tools to try and repair. Burn the
installer discs and never, ever use it again!
And from the school of “first, do no harm”, the very first thing to
consider is using the low-level fsck application (part of the Unix
core) to see if it can sort things out. It has a (non) interface only
a geek could love, but it has the benefit of never doing anything that
it can’t recover from (at worst it will tell you it tried and the disk
is still rotten).
Shut down your Mac completely.
Start it back up, and when the startup gong finishes, mash down the
Command and S keys at the same time, and keep them down until the
screen turns black with white writing on it.
When the white text gets done scrolling, you will find yourself
with a blinking text cursor at the bottom of the screen, next to a #
sign. Type fsck -fy and press return. Wait.
Read what it says after that. If it says something like “disk was
okay”, then you can quit (instructions for quitting follow).
If it says “disk was repaired”, then do the same thing again. Keep
doing it until you get a clean bill of health (some errors can hide
behind other errors, so you fix one, and a new one pops up).
If it says “the disk cannot be repaired” then at least you tried
and no hard feelings.
To shut down, type shutdown -h now at the prompt.
(If you’re reading this in Mail, I’ve wrapped the command-line
commands in back-ticks to make them read like code on the Web. Don’t
type those characters.)
And from the school of “first, do no harm”, the very first thing to
consider is using the low-level fsck application (part of the Unix
core) to see if it can sort things out.
Indeed. And this helps you do it, and does some more, too:
Loads of help thank you guys. When I try to boot from CD DiskWarrior (4.1) the Mac won’t boot from that CD. The only way is to run the Mac as Target and run DiskWarrior from my iBook. I know DW couldn’t repair the Mac, but I can’t remember the error reports, so I’ll run that again and report back in a while.
Thanks for the info, I’ll digest everything, including this suspicious looking bean salad my wife has just placed in front of me.
If you can’t boot a Mac from a DW CD, it’s likely that you bought that DW CD before that Mac model came out. Unfortunately, DW CDs need to be updated for most new Mac models. This is something Apple does and Alsoft just has to deal with it. Contact them and get a CD for your Mac Pro, making sure that they have one ready. (Alsoft has to wait for the disk image from Apple to make the boot CDs that they then ship out. Sometimes Apple is very slow about getting this to them.)
The other option is to make an external drive a bootable system disk for that Mac, put DW on it, and boot from that and repair.
Fantastic help thanks guys. The symptoms were, the Dock wouldn’t pop up with mouseover, so then selecting restart all desktop icons would disappear but no restart would happen. Force quit to Re-launch Finder would say Finder not responding and DW produced errors. This time however using DW on my iBook with the Mac started as target did work. DW managed to Rebuild and replace successfully, but checking files say: There’s a fault with the config.plist, the Property list data is damaged and cannot be repaired, and the com.macxtosh.SaveCircle1.2.plist also has a damaged Property list and cannot be repaired.
Walt, carried out your suggestion and no errors reported thanks. But not sure whether the above is serious or not.
Thanks Paul, I ran Applejack, couldn’t keep track of all the things it fixed, but the Mac seems okay. Sometimes before when restarting, I would login and it would freeze after that on the startup ‘space thing’ screen. In fact after installing Applejack, ReStart didn’t work. All desktop icons disappeared and the Mac just hung here, forcing a power button shutdown, but it’s done this before, so don’t think AJ is to blame.