Kernel panic while burning to a SCSI CD burner andresulting HD problems.

chemistry_geek

chemistry_geek

Registered
I had a really bad kernel panic while burning to my SCSI CD burner tonight. First, while copying the folder to the CD, the Finder only let half the contents copy to the CD, stating an "error -36" - have no idea what that is. When I clicked "burn", it burned the 362MB of data, but during the "verify" all hell broke loose. When I rebooted, 500MB of HD space was gone, POOF, and my HD had ZERO K available. All internet settings were lost. I managed to restore the internet settings by calling my ISP after giving up going through piles of CD's looking for the internet configuration file I created. Now I just want to reclaim the approximately 500MB I lost. Anyone know how to do that?

I tried using Sherlock to find any file that was created "Today" that was "larger than 1MB". It found nothing. I suspect some HD errors. I used the DiskUtility on Mac OS X upgrade CD to check the HD, numerous errors that it can't repair.

Man I get the feeling this is gonna hurt. I better move all my data and thesis to my other HD.
 
It sounds like your file system took a nasty hit and has become corrupted. I would hope you've tried booting off of some other drive (CD, alt drive, etc) and then trying to fix it with Apple's Disk Utility or comparable utility. And please save that thesis and other important data as fast as you can, you're in dangerous waters.
If disk utilities are unable to repair this or you're still having stability issues, formatting might be the only thing left to do.
 
I used DiskUtility from the install CD to recover most of the lost free HD space.

These are the latest errors cannot repaired by DiskUtility (there were many more that it corrected):

Missing Thread Record (id=173214)

Invalid volume directory count. (It should be 22388 instead of 22390)

Invalid volume directory count. (It should be 22390 instead of 22388)

I suppose this is better than the entire window being filled with red-text error messages when I first checked the disk. Are these current errors critical?
 
Actually, you probably lost 650-700MB depending on the size of the CD you used.

The space loss in question is actually due to the image that OS X created. When you were copying the files, you were actually putting them into the image, and having the image burned.

The kernel panic prevented the burn from completing cleanly, leaving that file. It is hidden, so Sherlock will have problems finding it unless you explicitly tell it to find hidden files.

Those disk errors are more likely due to use/etc. and some sloppy handling of the disk because of the kernel panic, as well as other 'wear and tear' over time.

Because of the severity, I would DEFINITELY backup and format the moment you have a day or two free to do this. If nothing is repairing it (the OS 9 CD will repair better than the OS X utility from my experience), including DiskWarrior (which is the best for this type of corruption in my opinion), then I would format for sure.
 
I am with Krevinek & Klink on this one - back up everything you need, this is a good time to use a zip disk and backup your backup if possible. use a good 3rd party repair program - Diskwarrior is best, techtool pro is good as well as drive10. If all you have is Norton (not a beta!!) then try it.

everything should still be there, it just isn't being indexed (in simple terms).

c_geek, If you don't own a diagnostic and repair program then this would be a good time to invest in one. While diskwarrior is the best in my opinion, and if you purchase it, it is worth it to get the disk and get plus optimizer for free, techtool has the ablilty to search and recover lost files which diskwarrior doesn't as far as i can tell. If part of your thesis or other really important documents are missing, you might want to go with TTP.

Good luck my friend. let us know how it goes.
 
Wow those were some fast responses. See how much your liked here Chem.
Both of you have giving excellent advice. And for Utilities I'm partial to Disk Warrior as well. I won't mention Notron or I might start frothing at the mouth.
There is one other thing you can try before the reformat and reinstall after you have backed up. That would be an 'fsk' command in a shell. My suspicion is those errors that DiskUtility are showing are orphaned inodes that need to be refound or discarded appropriately. The OS X file system is a bit more than just HFS+.

If you're comfy with this, do the following:
Boot into single user mode (Command - S)
When the machine has finished booting, enter in this command...
fsck -yv
(fsck is a file system check program. The option 'y' means answer yes to any repairs and the option 'v' means verbose mode for a more informative output)
Wait till the program finishes running and observe the output. Are there any errors found and repaired? If yes, repeat the command till you see no errors found or repaired.
Now reboot into normal operating mode by entering this command...
shutdown -r now

I would say sometimes it would be ok to operate a system with some orphaned files. These could just be remnants of your attempted burn as Krevinek suggests. On the other hand if you notice system instability, you might be able to get away with a reinstall and not blow away everything with a reformat and fresh install.

Let us know how things turn out.
 
You're lucky it wasn't a catastrophic failure. ... although SCSI cd burning seems to work, the adaptec kext is still crap. I can reproduce a panic by trying to rip mp3s off my 8424 yamaha scsi burner. It's bad.

tips, hard drives tend to fail catastrophically and without warning. If you care about a document, save it twice on different media. Scsi for anything other than a hard drive is still very scary under X. Sad but true. If you're gonna burn CD's, don't do it with scsi under X.

Also, for reasons of disaster recovery, it's still good to have multiple hard drives in your machine. I no longer promote crazy partitioning, but having your documents and a bootable system on another drive can ease your pain in the worst of times.

And I myself would not want to live with those volume structure errors. They are fairly serious. I think HFS is a very fragile format, and if we're not even gonna use the resource fork, we should transition to a journaling file system or something. This would reduce / eliminate these kinds of soft crash corruption errors. Good luck Chem.
 
Actually, Apple could journal just fine with HFS+ which supports an 'infinite' number of forks, so it could just create Data' and Resource' forks and store the journal data there. However, it would need to find a way to journal under UDF as well.
 
Thanks for all the suggestions guys, I REALLY appreciate the help. The system seems very stable now since nothing else has happened YET. I have two physical hard drives in my computer; I don't like partitions, they can mess up badly. The 12GB HD has been used for Mac OS 9, but that is hosed too, bad Apple upgrade installer munched something that had to do with the memory manager, or so the error said. So Classic hasn't been available for quite some time. I suspect that the errors on the Mac OS X HD are still there, lurking in the darkness waiting to show their ugly faces again. I think I will erase my Classic applications on the 12GB HD, copy EVERYTHING to that drive that can be copied, ZERO the 18GB IBM SCSI drive and reinstall Mac OS X from the ground up. Besides, I know the hard drive is fragmented to hell, it has never been optimized since OS X went on it. Man, this couldn't come at a worse time - 2.5 months of grad school left in the masters program and I have to mess with this in addition to getting all the loose ends tied up for getting my thesis done, submitting papers for publication, and running a few last minute experiments for graduating.

Thanks again guys, you've been a tremendous help.
 
if this is crunch time, maybe you should copy all of your stuff just in case, and then continue along as normal until you have some time. Reinstalling your OS is never a productivity enhancer in the short term.

Yeah, all of our drives are fragmented to hell. There's not a good solution right now. I'd love a background defragger. Maybe one that could run as a screen saver like seti. :-)
 
I should really let this thread die, but I feel obnoxious today. If you aren't going to religiously defrag your HD, the alternative is to keep your main HD, the one with the swap and the majority of temp file action, less than 50% full.

Files can go where they want at any time, but chances are they'll go there without fragmenting. This way you just don't get bad fragmentation. If you're going to fill a disk to capacity, make it a disk that isn't used for temp files. Yet another reason for multiple drives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top