Disk Warrior directory optimization on a system ssd?

Disk Warrior 5 reports poor directory optimization on my 3rd party system drive SSD - a Samsung 840 EVO 512GB drive. Knowing the issues with TRIM etc on Yosemite, is there any reason to not do this?

Yeah, I had already reached out to them, but I wanted to cast a wider net for opinions or reports. In the end, Alsoft responded with an AOK, and it went fine. Performance a little improved, for sure.

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My Windows 7 Professional desktop system hard disk got corrupted and I took the opportunity to install an SSD for a new system disk and reinstall Windows. The system is up and running on the SSD, with my old system disk now used for storage as it is stil

My Windows 7 Professional desktop system hard disk got corrupted and I took the opportunity to install an SSD for a new system disk and reinstall Windows. The system is up and running on the SSD, with my old system disk now used for storage as it is still readable. The only Adobe product I have reinstalled so far is Reader XI but I would like to reinstall Elements 8 and Acrobat 9 without taking up more licences as both are also installed on my laptop. Can you point me to the best way to do this? - Thanks

If you have the two allotted activations already and one was lost on the hard drive that failed then you need to contact Adobe Support thru chat and ask them to reset your activations.
For the link below click the Still Need Help? option in the blue area at the bottom and choose the chat option...
Serial number and activation chat support (non-CC)
http://helpx.adobe.com/x-productkb/global/service1.html ( http://adobe.ly/1aYjbSC )

Disk Warrior can't find directory

I don't know if this goes here or elsewhere but I had some problems, did archive and install, and now Disk Warrior can't find the directory. I recently began using Time Machine (forgot I had it) and my instinct is to erase the disk and use Time Machine to restore the data but I'm afraid to do anything until I know it"s the right thing to do.

Use your restore disc, choose English as your language, then go to Utilities in the Menu Bar and select Restore. Make sure that your Time Machine is mounted and then choose which point in time you want to restore from
You should be back in business shortly.
Message was edited by: MGW
That is, assuming that your drive is ok.

How to Run Disk Warrior on System Drive?

How can i run Disk warrior on the system drive?
Can I load the utility on an external drive and boot up from that drive?
How do I boot the Macpro from the external drive?

Install an OS on the external drive and then DiskWarrior. If you have DiskWarrior on DVD, you may be able to use that as well.
(55584)

Disk Warrior didn't work for data recovery. Any suggestions? After recovery, what's the best SSD for 13"MBPro?

My hard drive decided to quit after only 22 months! Some files were backed up but my current photo albums were not. That's all I really need, I don't care about all the other junk. I've tried booting from the Disk Warrior cd, which Apple Genuis Bar suggested since they don't do data recovery. Fortunately, I got the cd from my brother or I would've paid $99 and it didn't help at all.
So it there another way I can do this myself or should I just bring it to Fry's for $149?
Another question would be, after I recover the files, I'd like to upgrade my MacBook Pro 13 to a Solid State drive. I know I need a 2.5" SATA, but which brand/size is good for a $200-$300 budget?
Thanks for your time.

Thank you Sig for the information. Unfortunately, I ended up leaving my computer at Frys for Data Recovery. They have the best guarantee around since they can refund $115 of $149 if they couldn't retrieve any data. This was better than other services of $125/hr whether they could or could not get any data recovered. I didn't want to spend $99 and DataRescue couldn't even run.
I meant Disk Warrior was recommended by Apple Genius Bar to access my hard drive that crashed. They said it could "fix" it or at least power up so I can then retrieve my data. It couldn't find the hard drive. It just looped for 5-10minutes, which stated that if this was the case, the hard drive could not be "fixed" or accessed..replacement is needed.
Now I'm in the market for hard drive or solid state hd.

Rebuild with Disk Warrior

My hard drive failed the other day. I ran Disk Utility on it and when trying to repair permissions, I got errors saying that Disk Utility could not fix problems because of a drive failure.
I tried Drive Genius to do some diagnostics, but it couldn't do anything to the drive.
So, I can rebuild the drive with Disk Warrior, but it can't replace it. It will let me preview it. So, I can move the files to another drive. But what do I do after that? I assume I have to wipe the drive and reformat it. But then how do I get the backed up info onto that drive? Can I use Disk Utility for that? I know there's a Restore feature. If I can get the files onto the drive, will it be bootable?
Also, the drive is healthy, according to Disk Warrior, but should this be an indication that it's time for a new drive?

Kurt, it occurs to me that Al might be trying to rebuild that drive while still booted from it. He didn't mention it, but you didn't ask. If that's the problem, Disk Warrior would, as always, return the message that it can rebuild the directory info but can't replace it.
I'm sure Al already knows this. However, even very experienced people get in a hurry and forget that they must boot (and run Disk Warrior) from another drive (or from the CD / DVD that Alsoft ships to purchasers, which has both Disk Warrior and an OS X boot system on it) if they want to actually complete a repair of their main boot HD.
If you boot from the drive that you're trying to scan and repair, Disk Warrior will play nice and scan it, and can do various other graphing and diagnostic functions, but DW will refuse to whack, optimize and replace the directory & table files -- which is what performs the actual DW magic.

Disk Warrior & Tiger Cache Cleaner

Hi,
I'm new to the mac world, and I've been introduced to the concept of regularly needing to:
1. Use Disk Warrior
2. Clear the "cache"
I'm stumped by the premise that an operating system needs two third party utilities to basically function normally.
Could someone explain exactly why these utilities are needed and seem to be must-haves in the mac world?
Thanks,
Nikhil

IndianCowboy:
You've opened a can of worms, put 10 experienced mac users in a room and you'll get 12 opinions on maintenance and repair, and some will debate their methods quite vigorously. I've come to the conclusion that it really is individual, no two people have exactly the same software on their Mac or use it in the same way (you may not realize it but we each develop our own techniques).
In your case you came up against a serious directory problem that requires reinstalling the system, but this is rare. Overlapped files is very serious but also very rare and unlikely to be related to any maintenance or lack of it.
You'll need to play around a bit and find out what works best for you.
Personally, I don't run anything until my Mac starts acting up; gets slow, apps start crashing, or simply quirky behavior (or the rare kernal panic). Then, depending on how bad it is I'll run Cocktail (very similar to Tiger Cache Cleaner) or run Disk Warrior first then Cocktail. Where many problems start is in the caches which get rewritten constantly and so are volatile. Sometimes just a restart will fix these things or a Safe Boot (holding down the shift key). A safe boot runs some repairs and deletes all your font caches, so it's a good thing any time you are having font problems. And a simple restart will often fix many problems. It really takes some time to get the feel for what to do in each situation. I've gotten pretty good in figuring out what needs to be done with each bad behavior.
Before an update I will always run Disk Warrior and Cocktail first then repair permissions afterwards. This might be overkill but I have no problems with updates at all.
Or follow the advice others here have given, I bet most will work. Follow the link to Dr. Smoke's site, he has lots of very good info (including the problems you might run into with cache cleaning) and his method of rebuilding the launch services database is far better than any other, don't do this one with a utility, use the Doc's method.
But don't think of running Disk Warrior and cleaning caches as routine maintenance, it's repair for problems. The single most important thing you can do is clone your hard drive to an external Firewire drive. I don't put mine on a schedule for updating the clone but only do so when I know the system is purring like a kitten, so i know the clone is always in good shape. An added advantage to a clone is that it optimizes the disk (also known as defraging). Make a clone then restore it to your main hard drive and you have a perfectly defragged drive that runs very fast and is easier and faster than defragging software.
Kevin

PhotoShop CC 2014 - Blowing Directories on Hard Drives - Should Ship with a free Version of Disk Warrior ;-)

Since installing PS CC 2014 I have had serious problems.
Problems one could expect from a 'new' software.
However, having my drives' directories damaged due to Scratch Disks is something I have never seen before.
I had PS use an SSD as Scratch Disk. As this became full, I assigned another scratch disk (This time a RAID0).
As it ran full (200GB of PS Scratch) All the other files on that drive vanished. And photoshop was no longer able to even save the current document
(event though the destination had enough space avail.) See screenshot:(Watch the finder status in the back, the doc to be saved was 200MB and my disk had 3.38 GB avail.
But PS would not let me save due to scratch disks full)
Anyway, back to the serious problem. The RAID0 scratch disk, after I quit PS, was not longer mountable.
Trying to repair it with DU reported:
And trying with terminal This:
** /dev/rdisk13
Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-226.1.1).
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
** Checking extents overflow file.
** Checking catalog file.
** Rebuilding catalog B-tree.
CreateNewBTree returned -34
Disk full error
So I went ahead and did some research and found Disk Warrior.
It was able to rebuild my catalog and I am up an running again.
But having to spend $99 on a PS bug is not so nice. I have been able to recreate this problem 3 times the past hours.
The problem occurs only when PS is using the RAID as Scratch disk. If I try to fill the drive by writing to it via terminal or Finder,
i just get a Disk is Full. PS on the other hand will blow the catalog and make the disk unmountable...
Any Ideas ?

Thanks for your reply, Chris Cox. I've checked the Windows System Event Log and here are the details:
Details (Tab) of same error (Photoshop)
I noticed since Jan 5, 2015, Photoshop has crashed a lot. I run Adobe Illustrator with it but it doesn't give the same errors. Other applications run fine too, so I'm not sure if it as you mentioned that it is the "system" that is crashing so often.
(You seem to have suggested a video card upgrade. I will work on that next. Thanks)
I hope you or anyone who can, help me with this problem with Photoshop and the issue with my account in Creative Cloud.
Looking forward to your help. Thank you.

External Hard Drive won't mount - tried Disk Warrior, am backing up as a .dmg...will this work?

Hi Guys,
Hopefully someone can help! Fairly desperate situation here...
I backed up around 700GB of data to an Iomega external hard drive (supplied by the client), using my Macbook Pro...all was fine when I unmounted the drive at the end of the backup.
The client took the drive away and called me to say he mounted the drive in Windows (on a PC), and he was able to work with the files for a time, but now the drive won't mount...
I collected the drive, hooked it up to my Mac Pro, but OSX tells me it can't mount the drive. It shows up in Disk Utility in the sidebar, but not on the desktop...
I tried repairing the disk using Disk Utility and with Disk Warrior, both tell me the disk cannot be repaired...
I am currently making a backup of the drive as a .dmg file, using a program called Disk Drill...it's slow as I expected, but I'm still not sure the .dmg will mount...because surely it's just making a copy of the data exactly, of which some part is not mounting (a mount directory or something???)
Is there any way you guys can think of me somehow taking the data and backing it up onto another disk?
Specialist recovery services seem to think there shouldn't be any problem recovering the data, and of couse, as a costly last resort, that's what I'll have to do, but does anyone know how they may go about doing it? It is something vastly complicated such as a command line thing?
Sorry about the length of this question...just hope someone can help!
Thanks in advance...

You didn't say what format (filesystem type) the disk was.
However, I'd say your analysis is probably correct. Something has corrupted the disk. You can make a disk image copy to the .dmg which will preserve the data, such as it is, but I doubt extremely if it will fix any file system corruption.
Furthermore, if both Disk Utility and Disk Warrior have said the disk is unreadable I'm dubious that anything else will magically repair it and that recovery probably consists of snuffling through the disk block by block.
However if the filesystem is FAT (Windows) there may be other (Windows) utilities that can fix it.
You said you 'backed up the data'. Does that mean you still have the original data on your MBP? Are you trying to recover the client's changes?

Tiger Disk Utility filled up target AND system disk, CANNOT reboot!

I used Apple Disk utility to securely erase free space on a target drive on my laptop. Disk Utility filled both my target disk and system disk (system disk was not even specified in the erase procedure). Both disks have ZERO bytes free. The System disk will NOT startup and I cannot use DiskWarrior to rebuild the directory cuz there is no space. Tried using terminal to rm temp files, but it did not see the system disk.
*Problem Path:*
1) Laptop (Leopard OS X current version) video stopped working. Likely known problem with Graphics card.
2) Connected G5 (Tiger) to Laptop via Firewire with Laptop working in Target Disk mode (data only mode).
3) Laptop disk showed up as a disk volume on G5.
4) Used Apple disk utility on Tiger G5 to securely erase FREE disk space on Laptop disk drive B4 taking it in to get repairs. Amount to be securely erased was appr 65 to 70 GB.
5) Left G5 Tiger disk utility to work overnight... had to interrupt next day. Restarted..
6) Next day, the G5 disk utility said that it would be an est. 97 hours to complete. Stopped process.
7) Both target disk and system disk showed that 0 bytes (yes, ZERO bytes free) were free on either drive.
8) Attempted to restart with literature saying that you can restart Disk Utility as though it would delete temp files and start again. System could not be found (folder/face/folder/face showed on the screen)
*Attempted Solution:* (DW ~ DiskWarrior 4)
1) Started system up using DW CD. System disk came up as unknown.
2) Used Disk Warrior to rebuild directory on disk, but I believe that there is NO space at all. Disk Warrior took a very long time...more than an hour.
3) Terminated DW (it was still verifying directory)
4) Restarted system from Tiger install.
5) Attempted to use Tiger Disk Utility to verify system disk (System still can see it, but won't mount it-- name is now disk1s3 or something like that). Disk Utility said that disk directory had problems and needed to be repaired. Ran the repair, but Disk Utility said that it could not be repaired.
6) Quit Disk Utility and entered into the terminal to see if I could access the disk through unix commands. Access volumes from root. Only the other disk on the system showed up, not the system disk. So attempt to delete temporary files that MAY have been created by Disk Utility could not be done.
7) Restarted system using DW. Drive showed up as Unknown. Clicked on [Apple key] rebuild to do scavenge function. Left it for two hours. Little to no change. Left it to work all night.
HELP!
Will DiskWarrior use other volume on system or memory to save off or rebuild directory of bad drive? Anyone know of a utility that can help?
ANY HELP you can provide would be GREATLY appreciated. I have been put behind on research in my graduate studies and am in a terrible situation in now BOTH of my systems are inaccessible.

Hello HB3, and a warm welcome to the forums!
8) Attempted to restart with literature saying that you can restart Disk Utility as though it would delete temp files and start again. System could not be found (folder/face/folder/face showed on the screen)
You really shouldn't use a lower OSes DU to work on a higher one.
2) Used Disk Warrior to rebuild directory on disk, but I believe that there is NO space at all. Disk Warrior took a very long time...more than an hour.
What version of DW?
Anyone know of a utility that can help?
If DiskWarrior can't fix it, you might try Data Rescue II...
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
(Has a Free Demo to see if it could or not, but you'll need another drive to recover to).
Or FileSalvage...
http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?%20mainpage=product_info&productsid=1
to recover what you can, both can work when Disks are unmountable.

Using Disk Warrior on external drive causes MacBook crash

I work on MacBook System 10.6.7, I back up to LaCie external drive, which I partitioned so that one partition is only for backup, the other is bootable. On this partition I have a clone of Disk Warrior (4.1), to use on the MacBook .
Today I ran DW from the MacBook on the external drive for the first time, because lately it happens that the backup partition does not always appear in the finder (still performs back up though). I applied it first to the boot-partition, and it told me there were some problems. When it got to replacing the directory, the computer crashed mid way.
I performed Disk Verify on that partition through Disk Utility, and it said that it needed repair, and then that it did repair it. Checked other partition, no problem.
Tried again to rebuild directory for the external drive, and both partitions caused the MacBook to crash. I then booted from the external drive to see if it works, and ran DW on the MacBook, and had no problem there.
Anybody can tell me if it is the MacBook that caused the crash, or if the problem is with the external, and if there is anything else I can try to sort it out?
thanks,

I work on MacBook System 10.6.7, I back up to LaCie external drive, which I partitioned so that one partition is only for backup, the other is bootable. On this partition I have a clone of Disk Warrior (4.1), to use on the MacBook .
Today I ran DW from the MacBook on the external drive for the first time, because lately it happens that the backup partition does not always appear in the finder (still performs back up though). I applied it first to the boot-partition, and it told me there were some problems. When it got to replacing the directory, the computer crashed mid way.
I performed Disk Verify on that partition through Disk Utility, and it said that it needed repair, and then that it did repair it. Checked other partition, no problem.
Tried again to rebuild directory for the external drive, and both partitions caused the MacBook to crash. I then booted from the external drive to see if it works, and ran DW on the MacBook, and had no problem there.
Anybody can tell me if it is the MacBook that caused the crash, or if the problem is with the external, and if there is anything else I can try to sort it out?
thanks,

I have a G5 imac that is using Disk Warrior as the start up disk and can't change back.

I am using a G5 imac (OS 10.4.8 I think the last update is) and I was attempting to use Disk Warrior to recover a lost file. On my other Macs you made Disk Warrior the start up disk to use it, which I did here but I think that was a mistake. Now I can't change back to the regular start up disk.
I tried starting in safe mode but I think I'm getting kernel panic because it goes to a gray screen and tells me to restart.

I don't think Disk Warrior does file recovery. See:
Basics of File Recovery
Files in Trash
If you simply put files in the Trash you can restore them by opening the Trash (left-click on the Trash icon) and drag the files from the Trash to your Desktop or other desired location. OS X also provides a short-cut to undo the last item moved to the Trash -press COMMAND-Z.
If you empty the Trash the files are gone. If a program does an immediate delete rather than moving files to the Trash, then the files are gone. Recovery is possible but you must not allow any additional writes to the hard drive - shut it down. When files are deleted only the directory entries, not the files themselves, is modified. The space occupied by the files has been returned to the system as available for storage, but the files are still on the drive. Writing to the drive will then eventually overwrite the space once occupied by the deleted files in which case the files are lost permanently. Also if you save a file over an existing file of the same name, then the old file is overwritten and cannot be recovered.
General File Recovery
If you stop using the drive it's possible to recover deleted files that have not been overwritten by using recovery software such as Data Rescue II, File Salvage or TechTool Pro. Each of the preceding come on bootable CDs to enable usage without risk of writing more data to the hard drive. Two free alternatives are Disk Drill and TestDisk. Look for them and demos at MacUpdate or CNET Downloads.
The longer the hard drive remains in use and data are written to it, the greater the risk your deleted files will be overwritten.
Also visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on Data Recovery.

TM and Disk Warrior

The past few months I have had a problem with Time Machine getting corrupted often, but not always, when I do a restart. T M resides on a partition on an external disk. After a restart it either doesn't show up or is not mounted as shown in Disk Utility. The repair permissions and repair disk options are grayed out. Sometimes I can do a Verify Disk, but it always fails. The other partition on the disk is usually fine. Often if I run a repair permissions on the main Leopard partition on the iMac's internal drive, somewhere during the process a message appears that the T M partition is not repairable but is being made available with a read only functionality.
Disk Warrior sees the partition and will begin the repair process. After a short time a message appears in the DW window stating "speed reduced by lack of memory" The process hangs on step 5, locating directory data. I found one time that if I just let it go in background for up to 2 days, the process will finally complete, and continue on to repair the disk. T M then works fine until the next time I have to restart the iMac again. The latest repair report from DW is as follows.
• Errors, if any, in the directory structure such as tree depth, header node, map nodes, node size, node counts, node
links, indexes and more have been repaired.
• 2 iNode(s) had a link count that was repaired.
• 6 link files no longer point(s) to an original file and therefore cannot be repaired.
• 9 files had an incorrect key that was repaired.
• 1 folder had a directory entry with an incorrect flag that was repaired.
• 10 folders had an incorrect item count that was repaired.
• 29 folders had a directory entry with an incorrect custom icon flag that was repaired.
• Incorrect values in the Volume Information were repaired.
• Critical values in the Volume Information were incorrect and were repaired.
• There is no blessed System Folder, you will be asked to choose a System Folder after replacing the directory.
• 6 files could not be found.
• 9 folders could not be found.
• 11 folders will have more items.
• 1 folder will have fewer items.
• 10 files will now become accessible.
• 4 folders will now become accessible.
• 2 files had a Name that changed.
Disk Information:
Files: 2,963,472
Folders: 427,119
Free Space: 773.69 MB
Format: Mac OS Extended
Block Size: 4 K
Does anyone know what the problem might be causing T M to get corrupted, or at least how to get DW to perform the repair in a normal timeframe of just a few minutes?
Thanks

R C-R wrote:
By this, do you mean that the partition's name is the one that appears after "Name: " in the Time Machine system preference & the partition contains a root level folder named "Backups.backupdb"? Is this partition used for anything else besides TM backups?
Yes, separate partition with no other data on it.
Disk Utility's permissions verify & repair options should only be available for mounted volumes (partitions) that are viable boot volumes; IOW, that can be used as a startup disk. TM backups are not startup volumes (because among other reasons they have no root level system folders), so both of these options should always be grayed out for TM backup volumes unless there is also a separate installation of OS X on them. If you have ever seen them not grayed out, this would be abnormal.
BTW, I've been under the impression even partitions that are not bootable can be repaired. I have other partitions on other disks that have no system software that disk utility will go thru the repair process. Agreed that repair permissions is not available though.
Often if I run a repair permissions on the main Leopard partition on the iMac's internal drive, somewhere during the process a message appears that the T M partition is not repairable but is being made available with a read only functionality.
This doesn't make any sense to me. As explained above, permissions can't be repaired or verified on a normal TM volume. If you are repairing permissions on the normal startup volume on the internal drive of the iMac (or on any other startup disk), what is on the TM volume should be immaterial.
Doesn't make any sense to me either. It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen. Maybe something else is going on in the background while the permissions repair is going on that causes this result.
A few other queries:
How/when do you power down the external drive? If you shut down the Mac, do you wait for that to complete before powering down the external?
Restart only when necessary, such as when new or update to software requires restart. Shut down only if I am having some other problem that I think might be helped by doing so. At shutdown, externals power down automatically.
Is Disk Warrior an up-to-date, Leopard compatible version?
Yes - 4.1.1
Have you (perhaps inadvertently) manually changed anything in the folders of Backups.backupdb or created aliases that might reference any of its files or folders? Any chance that something destined for the other partition on the external drive accidentally was dropped into the TM partition instead?
Not to my knowledge.
Message was edited by: glassetcher

Disk Warrior Report

Kappy was helping me with my MBP problem with my MacIntosh HD. He recommended, as did others to get the Disk Warrior which I did. I ran it a couple of times last night after I talked with Apple Care support on line-he couldn't figure out what was wrong. I am asking for someone to review this, in particular the File errors down below and give me an interpretation.
I appreciate your help.
Time: 12/7/08 2:17:32 PM DiskWarrior Version: 4.1
DiskWarrior has successfully built a new optimized directory for the disk named "MacIntosh HD." The new directory is ready to replace the original directory.
Notes: All file and folder data was easily located.
Comparison of the original and replacement directories indicates that there will be changes to the number, the contents and/or the attributes of the ﬁles and folders. It is recommended that you preview the replacement directory and examine the items listed below. All ﬁles and folders were compared and a total of 13,919,576 comparison tests were performed.
Errors, if any, in the directory structure such as tree depth, header node, map nodes, node size, node counts, node links, indexes and more have been repaired.
File: "日本語.html"
Repaired Text Encoding Location: "MacIntosh HD/Applications/Adobe Bridge/Legal.localized/"
Explanations: Text Encoding: File and folder names are stored in Unicode characters. The text encoding value indicates the method used to convert the ﬁle name to Unicode. Repairs prevent the name from being displayed incorrectly.
Disk Information:
Files: 510,953
Folders: 135,461
Free Space: 79.31 GB
Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
Block Size: 4 K
Disk Sectors: 311,909,984
Media: FUJITSU MHW2160BHPL
Time: 12/7/08 8:29:49 PM DiskWarrior Version: 4.1 DiskWarrior scanned the disk named "MacIntosh HD" checking all ﬁles and folders for damage and potential compatibility problems.
Disk: "MacIntosh HD" Location: "Desktop"
The Property List data was checked in 10,101 ﬁles.
The Resource Data was checked in 6,340 ﬁles.
The maximum Folder Depth on this disk is 21. This does not exceed the maximum recommended depth.
File: ".cdc.mk4e.plist" Detected that Property List data is damaged and cannot be repaired.
XML parser error: Unexpected character at line 1
Old-style plist parser error: Unexpected character '0x4' at line 1 Location: "MacIntosh HD/Users/goldenmr2w/Library/Preferences/"
File: "com.apple.scheduler7098.plist" Detected that Property List data is damaged and cannot be repaired. Conversion of data failed. The ﬁle is not UTF-8, or in the encoding speciﬁed in XML header if XML. Location: "MacIntosh HD/Users/goldenmr2w/Library/Preferences/"
File: "com.apple.iphotomosaic.plist" Detected that Property List data is damaged and cannot be repaired. Conversion of data failed. The ﬁle is not UTF-8, or in the encoding speciﬁed in XML header if XML. Location: "MacIntosh HD/Users/goldenmr2w/Library/Preferences/"
Explanations Folder Depth: This number indicates how many folders are nested inside each other. If a disk contains only three folders and Folder A is inside Folder B and Folder B is inside Folder C, then this disk has a maximum folder depth of three. Folders nested too deeply can cause software compatibility problems.
Property List: This is a standard ﬁle format for storing data and is often used to store preferences. The names of these ﬁles normally end with a .plist ﬁle extension. Corrupt property list ﬁles can cause system instability.
Resource Data: This is an older ﬁle format for storing data and was often used to store preferences. The names of these ﬁles normally end with a .rsrc ﬁle extension. Corrupt resource data ﬁles can cause system instability.
Thank You Again,
golden2 Denver

Mr. Kappy-I did not see your name on board, and thank you so much.
I just ran a repair disk permissions and got:
Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/Resources/OwnerGroupTool" has been modified and will not be repaired.
which is a whole lot better than all the stuff I was getting yesterday before Disk Warrior.
So maybe that is why the Apple Care person could not find anything wrong.
Okay, I really promise this time not to touch anything I am not supposed to.
May I ask one thing-do you recommend downloading Disk Warrior and have it run routine maintenance as well? And it is okay if I can figure that our for myself, too.
I appreciate your very understandable explanations and recommendations.
golden2 Denver

Disk Warrior and 'The Folder with the ? Mark'

Good morning. My MacBook recently crashed and I am left with the dreaded and endlessly blinking 'Question Mark Folder'. I have tried to restart using the System Disk and running Disk Utility but the Hard Drive is nowhere to be found.
I have read in the Discussions that running DiskWarrior may help. I have the program on my PowerBook G4 as well as on an external hard drive, but I do not have a DiskWarrior disc. Is there a way to run the program from these to repair the drive on my MacBook or retrieve my data? If not, is there a way to make a DiskWarrior disc from my .dmg file?
Thanks for your help.
John

Disk Warrior comes on a bootable disc unless you downloaded it or lost yours. You cannot easily make a bootable CD or DVD, but your could put it on a bootable external hard drive that has a bootable copy of OS X (current version) and your copy of DW must be at least 4.0 for Tiger or 4.1 for Leopard.
However, it's most unlikely that DW will help you because the question mark means that important system files are lost or corrupted. The solution is to reinstall OS X. It's possible you can do the following:
How to Perform an Archive and Install
An Archive and Install will NOT erase your hard drive, but you must have sufficient free space for a second OS X installation which could be from 3-9 GBs depending upon the version of OS X and selected installation options. The free space requirement is over and above normal free space requirements which should be at least 6-10 GBs. Read all the linked references carefully before proceeding.
1. Be sure to use Disk Utility first to repair the disk before performing the Archive and Install.
Repairing the Hard Drive and Permissions
Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger.) After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then quit DU and return to the installer.
2. Do not proceed with an Archive and Install if DU reports errors it cannot fix. In that case use Disk Warrior and/or TechTool Pro to repair the hard drive. If neither can repair the drive, then you will have to erase the drive and reinstall from scratch.
3. Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When you reach the screen to select a destination drive click once on the destination drive then click on the Option button. Select the Archive and Install option. You have an option to preserve users and network preferences. Only select this option if you are sure you have no corrupted files in your user accounts. Otherwise leave this option unchecked. Click on the OK button and continue with the OS X Installation.
4. Upon completion of the Archive and Install you will have a Previous System Folder in the root directory. You should retain the PSF until you are sure you do not need to manually transfer any items from the PSF to your newly installed system.
5. After moving any items you want to keep from the PSF you should delete it. You can back it up if you prefer, but you must delete it from the hard drive.
6. You can now download a Combo Updater directly from Apple's download site to update your new system to the desired version as well as install any security or other updates. You can also do this using Software Update.

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