Disc problems - need some help
- Thread starter AdmiralAK
- Start date
AdmiralAK
Simply Daemonic
***** THE UPDATE *******
Well, Here is the end of the journey (so to speak
)
I let DiskWarrior do it's thing on my Mac's HD. It took it from Saturday morning till monday (or at least till saturday night - I left work with disc warrior running) to do its thing. The files were a bit messed up and it took DW a while to find things, but it did find most of everything. (My Greek names on Finder Folders were messed up afterwards but I fixed that).
Disc warrior did it's thing, ran it again to make sure that everything is OK. Then I ran norton and defraged the drive (it was moderatelly fragmented). Now my mac runs like a speedster again--too bad its only my work mac and not my home one
hehehhe
Admiral
Well, Here is the end of the journey (so to speak
)I let DiskWarrior do it's thing on my Mac's HD. It took it from Saturday morning till monday (or at least till saturday night - I left work with disc warrior running) to do its thing. The files were a bit messed up and it took DW a while to find things, but it did find most of everything. (My Greek names on Finder Folders were messed up afterwards but I fixed that).
Disc warrior did it's thing, ran it again to make sure that everything is OK. Then I ran norton and defraged the drive (it was moderatelly fragmented). Now my mac runs like a speedster again--too bad its only my work mac and not my home one
hehehheAdmiral
ElDiabloConCaca
U.S.D.A. Prime
Had this EXACT same problem a week ago and it ended up being a bum drive. I had OS 9 on an internal 10GB and OS X on an internal 20GB, both Western Digitals.
To make a long story short, I kept getting disk errors upon running fsck. I tried reformatting the drive and reinstalling, which would work -- but I was only doing the "initialize drive" option without doing the long, boring, zero-all-bytes format. When I finally did get around to doing the long format, it would error out every time.
I ended up yanking the offending drive out of there, muttering a few choice words and completely getting rid of OS 9 on my 10GB -- I never used it anyway. Reformatted with zero-bytes option, installed OS X, and haven't had a problem since.
The ironic thing is that this damn 10GB is four years old and keeps chugging along, while the 20GB is two.
The double-irony is that I'll be doing the complete reformat and reinstall AGAIN when Panther gets here... don't wanna do the upgrade route, and I'm so damn good at loading a machine now (I regularly service and fix ten of them) that I can have a complete OS X installation, complete with all fonts loaded and all programs loaded (Adobe suite, Macromedia suite, Quark, Suitcase, Office, and all updates) with the GUI tweaked to how I like it in about 2 hours.
I think we've all learned to keep a good backup or two laying around just in case... you never know when they're gonna go...
To make a long story short, I kept getting disk errors upon running fsck. I tried reformatting the drive and reinstalling, which would work -- but I was only doing the "initialize drive" option without doing the long, boring, zero-all-bytes format. When I finally did get around to doing the long format, it would error out every time.
I ended up yanking the offending drive out of there, muttering a few choice words and completely getting rid of OS 9 on my 10GB -- I never used it anyway. Reformatted with zero-bytes option, installed OS X, and haven't had a problem since.
The ironic thing is that this damn 10GB is four years old and keeps chugging along, while the 20GB is two.
The double-irony is that I'll be doing the complete reformat and reinstall AGAIN when Panther gets here... don't wanna do the upgrade route, and I'm so damn good at loading a machine now (I regularly service and fix ten of them) that I can have a complete OS X installation, complete with all fonts loaded and all programs loaded (Adobe suite, Macromedia suite, Quark, Suitcase, Office, and all updates) with the GUI tweaked to how I like it in about 2 hours.
I think we've all learned to keep a good backup or two laying around just in case... you never know when they're gonna go...
ElDiabloConCaca
U.S.D.A. Prime
I've experienced similar things as well, Urbansory -- it seems like OS X itself likes to corrupt a lot of the directory trees and b-nodes and what have you... all my drives, no matter how old they are, have NEVER had a problem UNLESS I install OS X on them.
I'd be willing to bet that slapping this drive back in the computer and reformatting it for use other than installing OS X on it would prove succesful.
I'd be willing to bet that slapping this drive back in the computer and reformatting it for use other than installing OS X on it would prove succesful.
ElDiabloConCaca
U.S.D.A. Prime
I'd be willing to bet that OS X itself is what's causing these sporadic node problems. Even though we're FAR along in the OS X cycle, in the big picture, its still in it's infancy.
UNIX just has TOO many files. The programs that run under OS X require hundreds of different files to run, and most of them are around 100k... constant reading and writing of files to the hard drive can result in these node errors we're seeing, I think.
I wonder if the new breed of SATA drives has better protection against these kinds of disk corruption... and I use that term lightly -- our disks are NOT corrupt, they just require very minor repairs from time to time.
I would also be curious to see if swapping my drives onto a faster bus would help -- the drives I have problems with are the drives connected to the slow internal ATA/33 bus. The drives that never exhibit problems are on an add-on ATA/100 bus... I wonder if putting my boot drive on that faster bus would eliminate some of these problems.
UNIX just has TOO many files. The programs that run under OS X require hundreds of different files to run, and most of them are around 100k... constant reading and writing of files to the hard drive can result in these node errors we're seeing, I think.
I wonder if the new breed of SATA drives has better protection against these kinds of disk corruption... and I use that term lightly -- our disks are NOT corrupt, they just require very minor repairs from time to time.
I would also be curious to see if swapping my drives onto a faster bus would help -- the drives I have problems with are the drives connected to the slow internal ATA/33 bus. The drives that never exhibit problems are on an add-on ATA/100 bus... I wonder if putting my boot drive on that faster bus would eliminate some of these problems.
I think i have a ATA/100, on my AGP G4. And i still get this problem, mainly on the system drive, I do get files overlapping every blue moon and recently i had that on 3 partitions, on two separate drives. I notice the partition i use least have no problems, while others will unmount, and bring the system down.
ElDiabloConCaca
U.S.D.A. Prime
Hmmm... are you using the internal bus for your drive? If so, you've got ATA/33 if you've got the G4 Yikes! PCI machine, and ATA/66 if you've got an G4 AGP machine.
Mine are connected through a Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 card.
Mine are connected through a Sonnet Tempo ATA/100 card.