format hard drive?

E

evilfelina

Registered
hi,
I have been having some problems with my ibook recently.... nothing drasitc but disk utiltiy found a 'keys out of order' error which it cannot repair and my ipod mini (which has worked fine for almost a year) is now unrecognized by OSX, with disk utility reporting it has an 'invalid sibling link'.
I don't have a lot of stuff on my hard drive so was thinking of fomatting it.
are there any problems i might encounter doing this (ie could the problems get worse)?
ANY advice would be greatly appriciated
Thanks. :)
 
Starting from scratch won't make the problem worse,
but it could recur. I'm with Bob. Get Disk Warrior (or
my personal fave Tech Tool Pro), and do some routine
maintenance. Disk Utility can fix a very few simple
things.
 
Whats happened is that the underlying fsck can no longer fix the problem, this is the basic filesystem fixer provided with a UNIX, it is usually runn at boot time but you can either choose to run it from single user during aboot. At this point if you run fsck -Y you will find that it is this that is unable to fix your disk, disk Utility also tries to run this. Disk Warrior I don't have, however reformatting you disk is way, way safer but its nothing like as cool.
 
If you do not want to save any of your stuff, you can format your harddrive and reinstall systemsoftware - no problem.
Lars Damgaard, MacSupport, Denmark.
 
I had a disaster in October, but managed to slowly get out of it, however I know this is not a fix that can be easily applied to a laptop, but on my G4 quicksilver I bought 2 low identicle, density 10GB hard drives and use these as root. Every so often I clone the root disk to its mate. I first reboot using the cloned disk, check the active root disk to make sure its ok, then reboot back onto the original, this makes sure I'm cloning a good disk. I don't use mirroring as I need to check the original first.
 
Had you clicked the paper-quill icon at the bottom right of
evilfelina's note (instead of just doing a quick reply) your
message would have gone to evilfelina, instead of to me.

Gee, those icons are confusing.
 
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