Disk Recovery/First Aid

Question

Hello
I am trying to repair a (supposed) disk error with my macbook pro and I've hit a bit of a snag.
Perhaps you folks can help?
I'll explain what's happened so far.
At first the macbook began running very slow.
So I opened the Disk Utility and tried to verify the disk.
When it tries to verify the catalog file,
it breaks, reporting the error "Invalid Node Structure"
So I boot the machine into firewire disk mode
and plug it into my iMac
Open Disk Utility, try to repair the disk
Again, the verification shows Invalid Node Structure,
so it tries "Rebuilding Catalog-B tree"
at that point, the progress bar just hangs there, and
just keeps returning "Invalid Record Count" lines
Also, the Macintosh HD is unmountable.
So, do you think I have a hardware problem with the HD?
It's fine if I have to replace it, but
how should I approach backing up the data if I can't mount the disk?
I will Include some screenshots...
any help is greatly appreciated.
thank you~ :]

Answer 1

statichue wrote:
At first the macbook began running very slow.
So I opened the Disk Utility and tried to verify the disk.
When it tries to verify the catalog file,
it breaks, reporting the error "Invalid Node Structure"...
..."Rebuilding Catalog-B tree"
at that point, the progress bar just hangs there, and
just keeps returning "Invalid Record Count" lines
Also, the Macintosh HD is unmountable.
So, do you think I have a hardware problem with the HD?
It's hard to say whether there is a hardware problem. TeenTitan wrote a nice list of the progression of troubleshooting. Disk Utility is the first line, but is somewhat weak. I have DiskWarrior and that's the next thing I try. If it fixes the disk, then wait some more. If the problem was a one-time software glitch, it should not happen again. But if the problems come back, or if DiskWarrior or a similarly powerful utility was not able to fix the problem, at that point it is probably not safe to continue using that disk.
statichue wrote:
It's fine if I have to replace it, but
how should I approach backing up the data if I can't mount the disk?
That's a hard question. The disk has to be able to mount before it can be backed up. But you should try anyway. I just replaced the hard drive on my friend's MBP. It would not boot, but when I took the drive out and placed it inside a FireWire drive dock connected to my Mac, her disk did mount, and I was able to copy all of the data (as far a I can tell) to her replacement drive. So I guess sometimes a drive might work in a dock or enclosure even though it isn't working in the laptop itself.
Fortunately, it's easy to take the disk out of current MacBook Pros. Then, to do the copy, you just need a cable for bare drives, an empty enclosure, or drive dock. You can get cheap ones, but I like the ones with FireWire 800 because they're so much faster. Then you just use Apple Disk Utility, SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to do your backup.