Disk Warrior help

Question

hi, here's my situation.
2.5 dual with 3.5 gigs of RAM. Running Tiger. hard drive i believe is a Hitachi (whatever is the default drive) and is 160 gigs.
I was editing in DVPSP 3 and it kept quiting on me. so i restarted. when i did the OS did not come up instead i got the folder with the flashing question mark. not good. it happened to me last year and i knew that i was in trouble.
I rebooted with the install cd. i then went to disk utility and tried to repair the disk. i got an error saying, "Invalid B-tree node size." from what i researched this means the drive is corrupted but not a hard drive failure, correct? i also looked for the start up disk but the drive was not detected there as well. all i saw was the install cd.
I also have another internal hard drive installed. a 250 gig drive that i use for all my video work. it just so happened that the drive i was working on last night was my main drive (the 160 gig drive) as the 250 gig drive was full. this drive seems to be ok.
I bought disk warrior last night which i installed on an Imac I have. I hooked this up to the 2.5 dual via a firewire cable. from the Imac i started Disk Warrior and i could see both my drives on the 2.5 dual. i selected my damaged drive and selected "Rebuild."
I realized it was going to take a few hours so i went to sleep. this morning it was done and i read the report, saying it had built a temporary drive. like the dummy that i am (and being half asleep didn't help) i accidently cancelled everything. i didn't click on "Replace." ah!!!
so i re-did everything while i went to work this morning. so when i get home later today, after i click on "Replace." everything will be good? i realize some stuff might be lost but i want to at least be able to boot into my system. i have a lot of photos that i want to save and also the latest project i was working on.
is it true you can also "Preview" the new drive and be able to back up files right then before it replaces your old drive.
any advice will be greatly appreaciated! thanks.
- robert

Answer 1

Hi, Roberto and ds_store—
I'm writing to share a few thoughts, fwiw, in addition to ds_store's helpful reply. Though I consider myself a relative newbie to such maladies (particularly in OS X), I've unfortunately also experienced disk corruption within the last 10 days. . .
(1) Re: "this means the drive is corrupted but not a hard drive failure, correct?" — probably. But this is something you can easily check. I'd suggest two things:
](a) Booting from your Install Disc, open Disk Utility and select your HD. Note the "S.M.A.R.T. status." Hopefully, it says "verified."
](b) While holding down the option key, boot from your Install Disc again. This will provide you with 2 or 3 choices of "boot volumes" for startup. Select Apple Hardware Test (AHT). Run in Extended Test mode. Among other components, this will provide results evaluating your logic board, mass storage (HD), and memory (RAM).
If Disk Utility reports S.M.A.R.T. status "verified" and AHT indicates that mass storage has "passed," these provide a strong indication that your HD probably has not suffered any significant hardware failure. (Note that this is not definitive without further diagnostics that an Apple-Authorized Service Provider can conduct.)
(2) Another benefit of running AHT is that it may provide an indication of other factor(s) that caused your Power Mac to suffer from such significant disk directory corruption. Imho, this is a question well worth your attention. (In my case, it was bad RAM. Not only didn't DiskWarrior work initially because of this — but the directory would have probably become corrupted again because of the RAM problem, even if I had been able to replace the directory with one "rebuilt" by DW.) Assuming DW does work for you (which seems likely, based on what you've described), you may benefit from running Disk Utility and DIsk Warrior again in the near future as a means to evaluate whether there is an ongoing source of corruption. Keep in mind that DW focuses on disk directory maintenance and repair — other HD maintenance/repair functions require TechTool Pro or other utilities.
(3) Re: "a lot of photos that i want to save and also the latest project i was working on" — if DW is successful, your data may be fine. But if it proves necessary (and directory corruption isn't too bad or is improved by DW), you may be able to recover your unsaved data using FireWire Target disk mode, with your PowerMac as target and iMac as host.
(4) Re: "is it true you can also "Preview" the new drive and be able to back up files right then before it replaces your old drive?" — I haven't tried this personally with DiskWarrior, but it should be feasible, according to the details described in the "What to Look for During Preview" section (pp. 30-33) of the DiskWarrior Manual that you can read from its CD.
I hope some of this is useful to you. Good luck!
Dean