diskwarrior frozen, mac tells me to poweroff.

[diego018]

hi there, im new here. i have never had a problem before with my macbook, 1 year running flawlessly. i tried to update to 10.6.4 and my hard disk became unbootable. i tried fsck in SUM, disk utility repair disk in Mac os install dvd, grey button on repair permissions, so i decided to try disk warrior. i have left it in the night running, and the 2 times i tried, i found this screen when i woke up:

"step 9 recording any file or folder differences 273,xxx,xxx tests"

"You need to restart your computer. hold down the power button..."

when i restarted the computer, i got a report that was going to be sent to mac, with lot of stuff like:
"panic(cpu 0 caller 0x234059): "zalloc: \"kalloc.8192\" (140 elements) retry fail 3, kfree_nop_count: 0"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1456.1.25/osfmk/kern/zalloc.c:981
Backtrace (CPU 0), Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x2b6a29c8 : 0x21acfa (0x5ce650 0x2b6a29fc 0x223156 0x0)
0x2b6a2a18 : 0x234059 (0x5874f8 0x585f41 0x8c 0x3) "


should i give up and reformat the drive? i have my user folder backed up, but all my applications are not backed up. i was trying to not lose them.

 

[Whitehill]

It looks as if you can boot from the install DVD. Start the installation to determine if it can see your disk. If it can, it should offer to perform an archive-and-(re)install of OSX to the version on the DVD. This will give you a clean installation of the system, leaving everything else alone. I had to do this about a month ago for other reasons (see below) and it worked fine. It didn't touch applications or user directories.

When that's done, do NOT perform software update. Instead, download the latest combo update (10.6.4?) from apple.com, burn it to a DVD, and install from that. Then use SU for everything else.

The above worked for me.

Now the bad news. I too have the latest version of DiskWarrior. I followed their advice and booted my system from their DVD, just to make sure it performed as advertised as an emergency disk. It worked and I didn't do anything except tell it to restart. Shortly thereafter it told me my internal disk was not bootable. At that point, following advice from Apple tech support, I performed the steps outlined above. *sigh*

 

[djackmac]

Usually if disk warrior is running and the machine or machine running disk warrior is kernel panicking while working with a drive, that usually points to a bad drive. Its saying speed reduced by lack of memory, how much RAM do you have installed?

 

[Doctor X]

I came into the world discovering that a bad RAM chip will do what you are suffering from. The problem is you will not necessarily see the problem until you tax it--such as updating and/or fixing your OS. It will cause progressive problems with your volume until your are frelled.

There is a very cheap test--memtest--that will quickly determine if RAM is a problem--other than swapping out the RAM. Good news is RAM is cheap and most have life-time warranties.

If not the RAM and somehow you frelled your volume, the advice from Whitehill holds. I have never had Disk Warrior do to me what happened to him, however, but those are "famous last words" in trouble shooting!

Oh . . . and . . . uh . . . back everything up!

--J.D.

 

[diego018]

thanks. i can boot up from the Snow leopard install dvd, it detects the disk, but it wont let me install over it, it ask me to format it first.

djackmac, i have 2gb ram.

i will test my ram to see if it has a problem.