Norton trashed 10.2.3 - restore with carbon copy cloner? Help!

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erikv11

Registered
I should have looked around here, seen all the problems with Norton, before I used a friend's NU (disk doctor then speed disk) on my 10.2.3 TiBook (800). A few B-tree repairs, defrag'ed, ran again and did a few more B-tree repairs (started to get worried) then NU froze up with my disk unmounted. force quit, try to restart but can't.

Now I can't start (stalls out at grey screen with apple), and the HD won't mount when starting up in 9.2.2 from a cd (The NU disk is still in the drive. is there a way to get this out, maybe I could put system disks in there?). I can start up in firewire target mode when cabled to my desktop; if I then try to repair by running Apple's disk utility on the desktop machine, my battered hard disk can be seen (Although my disk "Albatross2" is grey and "not mounted") I get :

Repairing disk "Albatross2".
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
Rebuilding Catalog B-tree.
Repair completed.

which sounds encouraging but actually nothing is fixed, the machine is still dead and i get the same series of responses each time I run the repair command.

is there a way to mount? does this sound salvageable? help!

Assuming I am dead in the water here, the one saving grace is that I did a full bootable clone to my external firewire drive before I installed NU and tried any NU nonsense (seemed to remember some cautions about using NU ...). So can I get Albatross2 back? Could I initialize the HD and then clone back onto the initialized TiBook? Or do I have to do something else first, reinstall Jaguar? How do I get the machine started with the f/w drive hooked up, to do such a cloning?

Thanks for any advice, in a bad spot here ...

Erik
 
a few options seem possible. one is that Diskwarrior has a great reputation for mounting and repairing damaged disks.
on the other hand, if you are sure you have all your needed and irreplacable files on your FW drive, then there doesn't seem to be much reason you couldn't just reformat the original and use carbon copy cloner to move it all back.
either operation is probably going to take awhile, so it's pretty much your choice. just be sure you've learned your lesson with nortons which will claim to be fixing something from now untill eternity.
 
thank you. certainly a (hard) lesson learned re norton.

I am as confident about having all my data as i am confident in ccc. and ccc seems rock solid so i trust the clone i made literally minutes before starting merrily down the road to destruction. and I don't have Diskwarrior, though I'd somehow prefer to try that route first. so in the morning (when I get to work where the f/w drive is) I guess I'll scour the clone for yesterday's work, cringe and the wipe the drive and clone.

but sorry for my ignorance - In order to ccclone back onto the reformatted disk, how do I start up, to get the f/w talking to the TiBook? Do I need to get a second machine in the loop? The two sequences I can envision:

option 1:
reformat TiBook <no special partitioning etc. is *required* right?>
install minimal 10.2 on TiBoook
mount f/w, set as startup disk
restart from f/w, ccclone onto TiBook
all should be well again


option 2:
Or would it be better to
corral another Mac
startup from my f/w while it is connected to that Mac.
then reformat TiBook in target disk mode,
continue on and clone onto reformatted book from there (avoiding an extra system install)?

any comments?

thanks -
 
Can you boot up off the OS X install disc and run Disk Utility to try to repair the hard disk? If you could actually boot into OS X, I would suggest going into single user mode and doing an fsck -y as an alternate method.

If that doesn't solve anything (it should be the quickest option), I would think CCC would be a good solution for you.

FireWire target mode can be tricky, some disk utilities don't support it, and it probably wouldn't be wise to clone a desktop system onto a laptop system, as certain settings and configurations will be tuned for desktop use rather than portable computing.
 
"Data Rescue" saved my live about 2 months ago. If a disk/partition doesn't mount anymore it'll extract all the data for you onto another disk/partition. I got about 98% of the data back and I am certain that the 2% that were lost actually got screwed up by Norton (which I unfortunately ran before turning to Data Rescue). Norton used to be awesome back in the day System 7.x (maybe until early 8.x) but I had to realize that nowadays I'd rather use voodoo magic to save my data than letting Norton even have a glance at my disk. I gave it a last chance and it disappointed me one last time...
 
DiskWarrior !!!!!!

DiskWarrior, three rebuild iterations, now I can mount and all my data seems to be there but I can't start in 10.2.3. Almost all of the several hundred files/directories that DW had to fix/relocate (etc) were related to the system so I'm not too surprised. i can start in 9.

The directory structure was apparently wasted, but DW just crunched along and got through it. For those using DW, note that repetitions seemed to be important, only after the third run did DW say there were zero problems with the file/direcory structure.

On the other hand, in this case Disk Utility and TechTool deluxe couldn't do anything from the internal CD drive.

Now I need to decide whether to do a clean install or not. I think I'll reclone parts sequentially (starting with systems and apps ...) from my CarbonCopyCloner clone on external f/w, from which I'm booted from right now, then see how things go. In the meantime I'll be rounding up all the installlers to one place in case they're needed ...

Thanks mucho for the bulls-eye snippets of help from this forum, it is the only reason I am back up. Much relief, all data seems to be intact. Sure I have a CCC clone but somehow I wasn't sure I would get a chance to use it!

DiskWarrior saved me, Norton Utilities will NEVER get a look at my X disk(s) again.
 
another person has seen the light. Glory be unto DiskWarrior!!!

glad you're back in action. :)
 
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