# EMERGENCY!



## AlexColeman (Mar 8, 2009)

My hard-drive a western digital 320 my book (black) is failing to mount on my macbook pro. It is 10.5.6, and it won't mount on the desk top. When I run Disk Utility, it says
 Invalid node structure
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
Any help is appreciated.


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## table1349 (Mar 8, 2009)

Sorry to hear about the problem.  Never experience it before so I have no advise other than to perhaps try these two forums. 

Apple - Support - Discussions - Forum Home
Mac Forums - Mac News and Rumor Discussion

It seems that there is a lot of that going around.  Someone might have a remedy for you situation.


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## AlexColeman (Mar 8, 2009)

I have tried everything, won't mount. I am really aggravated as it won't work, because it has my LR catalog on it.


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## Garbz (Mar 9, 2009)

As a matter of interest bring up a console and type fsck which is a unix package to check file systems. If it comes up then it may be called the same thing in MacOSX in which case this package is a good place to start since it can repair broken Inodes. 

But maybe a mac user can give you something better to go on.


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## Slaphead (Mar 9, 2009)

Garbz said:


> As a matter of interest bring up a console and type fsck which is a unix package to check file systems. If it comes up then it may be called the same thing in MacOSX in which case this package is a good place to start since it can repair broken Inodes.
> 
> But maybe a mac user can give you something better to go on.



Good idea, but unfortunately it won't get you anywhere in this situation - FSCK is run by the disk utility and has already reported that it can't repair the volume (Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.). This message indicates that FSCK doesn't think it can repair the volume (at least in my experience - which is a lot)

The tool that I run to in this event is (actually in any disk problem) is DiskWarrior

I've had amazing success getting back data with this tool - even when drives are on the brink of complete hardware failure.

I SERIOUSLY recommend that you buy another hard disk so that when Diskwarrior has done it's stuff you can preview the repair and copy your data to it. Do NOT attempt to replace the disks directory with the rebuilt directory without copying the data first - if the disk is failing then this can turn a recoverable situation into a total loss.

As ever with data recovery your mileage may vary, and if diskwarrior can't do anything (I've not come across anything yet that's worked when diskwarrior hasn't) then realistically you'll need to send your disk to a professional data recovery outfit.

Hope this helps and good luck.


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## flea77 (Mar 9, 2009)

This kind of stuff is what I do all day, every day, and SlapHead has it right on. Quit messing with it, leave it off until you are ready to do the recovery. Run it as little as possible to get what you need, then replace it.

Allan


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## AlexColeman (Mar 9, 2009)

I have been trying to use DW, however it gives me an error.


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## Garbz (Mar 9, 2009)

Rule 1 when talking about errors is "State the bloody error"


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## Slaphead (Mar 10, 2009)

Yeah, as Garbz said, we need to know what the error is.


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## AlexColeman (Mar 10, 2009)

Error 2158. Thank you.


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## Garbz (Mar 11, 2009)

:banghead:


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## Slaphead (Mar 11, 2009)

OK, try this - Hold the option (alt) key down and click on rebuild. This should now throw up another window. Select "Scavenge" and then click on rebuild. This could take a while.

By the way was there any error description associated with the that error code? I've had "similar" codes (2155) which indicate things are very bad but I've never experienced a 2158.

If the scavenge doesn't work then I think you have to decide if the data is worth sending the drive to a professional data recovery firm.


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## Slaphead (Mar 11, 2009)

Garbz said:


> :banghead:



Yeah, I know, but I get this every day, so I'm used to it.


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## Mike_E (Mar 11, 2009)

Alex, is it making any unusual sound?  IOW might it be a hardware issue?

Also, forgive me if someone else has mentioned this, have you tried getting a Knoppix Linux CD/DVD 

(a free operating system on a disk that you just insert and boot up- saves you from having a dual boot on startup and you can take it with you easily )

and seeing if you can navigate to it from Knoppix?  Sometimes you can blow past the error and get directly to the files.

good luck.


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## krayon (Mar 11, 2009)

The WD My Books are notorious for doing things like this.  At my regular job we bought 3 of them and had to replace all of them due to failures.  If you search Google you will see a lot of people complaining about the My Books.

I know this doesn't help much in recovering the data, but just as a warning.  When you buy are replacement... try a different drive.

It turns out that in most cases it is not a physical hardware problem with the drive, but the OS/Software that runs the drive.


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## Village Idiot (Mar 11, 2009)

Just buy two 500GB drives and a RAID enclosure and mirror them.


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## uplander (Mar 12, 2009)

I want to do something as you described. I would like to have 2 1TB hard drives and set them up as a RAID 1 (mirrored). I have seen some dual drive raid 1 setups (ex. G-SAFE, Guardian MAXimus eMax and MyBook Mirror edition) all in one enclosure.  Is there such a hardware device out there that allows you to plug in a pair or more of hard drives and use them in a hot swappable raid 1 config?


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## AlexColeman (Mar 12, 2009)

Yes, it is called a thread jacking. 

I did the scavenge that you described, and it returned error 2159.


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## MBasile (Mar 12, 2009)

I had a similar issue with my Seagate drive not mounting. The problem started when the power kept going out and back on before I could get to the drive and turn it off. The drive would turn off because the power went out, and then while still spinning down it'd start up again and remount to the Mac. It did this a few times and finally refused to mount.

Figuring the HDD was done for anyways, I used Disk Utility to do a simple erase and then the drive mounted! I used this software to recover the data. I'm not sure if it'll get the LR catalog file, but it'll recover the photos if they are on the disk. They also have a cheaper "photo only" recovery software.

The only problem is though that when the Mac system erases a disk, it doesn't save the file names with the information, so when you recovery the data the new filename is just a string of numbers (I think it's the location the data is at on the disk).


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