Invalid Sibling Link & Catalogue Errors

Question

Alright. First the MBP: It's got 10.4.7 installed on a 72gb partition with WinXP SP2 (running MacDrive) filling up the rest of the 100gb. I left the MBP on last night to download a couple files and nothing seemed worng with it. I shut it down and took it to work where I used Windows all day without a problem. I shut it down again and brought it home. Left it to boot into OSX and when I came back I was looking at a bunch of Unix command line speak. Lots of 'file not founds' and the three big scary ones: A couple about checksum errors (mach should be 1, found 0; mach.sys should be 147 found 47) and one invalid sibling link.
I booted from the install disc and ran Disk Utility's Verify and Repair. Both crapped out early citing the three scary errors and an internal error that prevented it from completing. I immediately tried backing up my OSX Partition to an external. That went swimmingly until the end when it simply said, "An error has occurred Error -3087" (don't quote me on these exact error messages, I'm now doing this from memory. read on and you'll see why)
I booted into single user mode and attempted to fsck the problem away (following the suggestion from http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214) but that too met the same fate as Disk Utility, failing on the Catalogue check.
Now, really frightening things are happening. I boot it up into Verbose mode to see what's happening and it simply repeats "SATA PROBLEM Completing a zero block transfer." ad inifinitum.
The weirdest thing about this whole thing is that Windows still boots and operates flawlessly. With MacDrive I can still look at all my OSX files too. Opened up a couple movies and mp3 which worked fine.
Helps me please!

Answer 1

Shaun,
You have suffered a major disk error. This doesn't mean that your HD is "fried," only that the file system on that one volume (the one with OS X) is damaged. It happens.
Since you can boot into Windows and access that volume using Macdrive, I recommend you use that facilty to make a backup of your HOME folder on the OS X partition by copying it, preferably to an external drive.
Based on the fact that this is a new machine, you might have a bad block on the HD. This is common with new HDs, in my experience. If a format (erase) of the OS X volume and a reinstall doesn't work the first time, you might need to consider "zeroing" the entire drive. Yes, including the Windows volume. By choosing the drive (or "device," as it's called) in Disk Utility, then "zeroing" the drive, Disk Utility will "map out" any bad blocks that are on the drive, thereby helping to prevent further disk errors. Many of us like to do this with any computer, right out of the box. It avoids having to go through what you now must.
If you need instructions on doing any of this, just ask.
Scott