Disk Warrior Is Girly Man?!

[quickKick]

Hey All,

Just checking around this awesome forum for similar symptoms, and can't find a close enough match.

I have a dual 2 g5 with 1.5 g RAM. Yesterday it locked up while starting Firefox and i couldn't do any sort of a force quit. I let it hang for a bit then shut it down.

When i started it up again i got the dreaded grayscreen/question mark. So I followed the mac help on my other system and tried to run Firstaid. I tried repairing a couple times and everytime it ended in a different error. I even reset the PRAM.

The latest Firstaid error: "Volume bitmap needs minor repair" followed by "Disk drive needs to be repaired"....supposedly the former isn't even a real error, I think Apple calls it a 'phony error'

So I ran teh latest DW 3.0.3 and I get 'Directory can't be rebuilt, the disk format is unsupported
- This disk does not appear on the desktop
- This disk is 149.05 GB in size
Advanced:
-Device ID : disk4
-Sectors...
-Sector Size...
-File System Type: [unknown]
-Model ST3......

I guess I'm asking; How do i get DW to recognize an "Unknown" disk?
(I've archived most everything on the drive so if push comes to shove I can take my ball and go home)

[mhennick]

Then run disk utility to mount your bad drive. Run Diskwarrior off of your firewire boot drive. Maybe that'll work? Good luck!
Mark

[quickKick]

Thanks for the suggestion mhennick!
I should have tried that earlier.
The disk utility stopped seeing the drive all together, meh


I had contacted the folks at Diskwarrior's Allsoft and after looking over the error reports they've suggested scrapping/replacing the drive. They responded to my emails quicker than I had thought they would, I'm pretty impressed with their customer service!

We are fortunate in that the Applecare was registered (register immediately!!) and doesn't expire till October of this year. So our local Apple specialists are going to replace the drive for us.

[Natobasso]

Did you try booting up with your system disc 1 and running the disk repair from there? File/Open Disk Utility/Repair Disk. (Don't reinstall OS X; just run the repair.)

If that doesn't work then you probably have a bad hard drive. Though if you have a hardware test disc you can boot up with that and test your drive for faults.

[quickKick]

Originally Posted by Natobasso

Did you try booting up with your system disc 1 and running the disk repair from there? File/Open Disk Utility/Repair Disk. (Don't reinstall OS X; just run the repair.)

If that doesn't work then you probably have a bad hard drive. Though if you have a hardware test disc you can boot up with that and test your drive for faults.

thanks for the response.

the disk 1 was the disk utility that i tried reparing with, then it stopped recognizing the disk. It was Diskwarrior that could read the minor specs of teh drive but called it 'unknown'.

I believe the Mac shop we took it to ran the hardware tester and their final verdict was a bad harddrive. Thankfully I archived, though I could have recovered if I acted quicker and not tried to repair so many times using teh native Repair Disk and utilized more external options.


thanks all