Weird Error When Verifying External HDDs

Question

Hello
I'm getting a weird error when verifying my 2 external HDDs. Both give me an "invalid leaf record count" error. But only when I check them with the OSX install cd. If I check them in my user account, they come up OK. Both drives also gave me a "reserved fields in the catalog record have incorrect data" error. Disk Utility was able to fix that error, but not the invalid leaf error. I have tried multiple repairs, but DU says the volume cannot be repaired. The other weird thing is when I ran the first repair, it said 1 HFS Volume Repaired and 1 Volume could not be repaired. I have also tried using Disk Warrior, but it gives a "this volume appears to be formatted with a newer version of the OS" error.
Both these drives I had plugged into my mom's iMac (running 10.5--my eMac is running 10.3.9) because I had firewire problems back in June. Did 10.5 modify something that has 10.3 mixed up?
Is there something I can do to fix this or do I need to do another re-install?
Music Luver
"+I hear her playing music+..." ~ Barry Manilow

Answer 1

OS X 10.5 does add additional attributes bits to the file descriptors, so using the drive under 10.5 would be expected to add those additional bits to at least the disk directory plus any modified files.
When you then check the drives using utilities created prior to OS X 10.5, those older utilities don't understand the additional bits and report then as errors (DU), of the utilities check first and refuse to run if the disk is tagged as from a latter OS version (DW).
There's a generic warning about mixing older utilities with newer OS versions in Only use Mac OS X 10.4-compatible disk utilities with Mac OS X 10.4 volumes.
I'd be ready to shrug the error reports off as spurious; however, that DU "corrected" the reserved bits suggests the drive directories will be rewritten again should you again move the drives to a 10.5 computer. Are you seeing any actual problems wiuth reading or writing to the external drives? If not, write it off to 10.5 settings bits that earlier versions ignore; it shouldn't affect your data.