How to revive a "broken" hard disk?

On Tue, 1 Jul 2008, Udo Huth wrote:

> Disk Utility cannot repair the drive. It displays the error "Invalid
> node size of the B-tree-header"

In my experience, this is often an indicator of a bad drive.

Disk Warrior *might* be able to stabilize it.

But you might also find that it can't be stabilized for very long.
 
> Trying as root with fdisk wasn't successful either, as fdisk didn't
> recognize either "fd1" or "/dev/disk1s10" as a valid argument.

But that would never have worked:

    $ apropos fdisk
    fdisk(8) - DOS partition maintenance program
    $

Unless you have it formatted as a FAT / FAT32 disk for Windows, in which
case it wouldn't be bootable by OSX, `fdisk` isn't going to help you.

You might be able to use `fsck`, but that's implicitly what Disk Utility
uses in the background, so if DU didn't work, fsck won't either.
 
> How can I make that hard disk workable again??

Try Disk Warrior, or replace the drive.


--
Chris Devers

On Tue, 1 Jul 2008, Udo Huth wrote:

> am 01.07.2008 16:41 Uhr schrieb Chris Devers unter cdeverspobox.com:
>
> >> Disk Utility cannot repair the drive. It displays the error "Invalid
> >> node size of the B-tree-header"
> >
> > In my experience, this is often an indicator of a bad drive.
> > Disk Warrior *might* be able to stabilize it.
> > But you might also find that it can't be stabilized for very long.
>
> Hi,
>
> thanks for answering. I did "experiment" some more. Formatting the
> drive for the MS-DOS file system results in another error. Trying to
> format for the Unix file system yields an "I/O error" - so I thing
> you're right, that disk is toast...

Yep, I/O errors are in my experience a clear sign that the HD is dying.
 
> >> Trying as root with fdisk wasn't successful either, as fdisk didn't
> >> recognize either "fd1" or "/dev/disk1s10" as a valid argument.
> >
> > But that would never have worked:
> >
> > $ apropos fdisk
> > fdisk(8) - DOS partition maintenance program
> > $
> >
> > Unless you have it formatted as a FAT / FAT32 disk for Windows, in which
> > case it wouldn't be bootable by OSX, `fdisk` isn't going to help you.
>
> Hm, why then is "fdisk" installed with the underlying Unix of Mac OS?

Because [a] it isn't unusual for Macs to live in a mixed-OS world where
they might have to manage "alien" disk formats from time to time,
because [b] it's a very common open source tool for this kind of thing
that a lot of people are familiar with, and because [c] it's 88kb and
Apple probably figures they can afford to give it some space :-)

> I read the man page of "fdisk" and it oughta be able to format the
> disk with "-a hfs" for the HFS file system -- or did I get that
> completely wrong??

It might work, but it's a weird way to do it.

Until you posted this, I hadn't even realized that OSX ships with a copy
of fdisk. It's a pretty old tool (I've used it at least as far back as
Windows 95, if not DOS & Windows 3.1), but it isn't really thought of as
part of the "standard" Mac command like disk management toolkit. More
typical are tools like fsck (probably what you were looking for here),
diskutil, hdiutil, plus the GUI Disk Utility, which uses those three.



--
Chris Devers

Quoting Udo Huth <u.hutht-online.de>:

> Hello all,
>
> I have added a 160 GB hard disk to my Power Mac G4 MDD. After trying to have
> SuperDuper make a backup of my main drive to that hard disk I cannot
> access it any
> more and it isn't displayed on the desktop.


Try selecting the disk HDxxxx in Disk Utility and then erasing the
entire drive. That should reformat the whole thing; although you'll
lose anything on it if you reformat it.

If you've got DiskWarrior it might repair the disk directory; but
reformatting is the easiest answer.

neil

On Jul 1, 2008, at 6:52 AM, Udo Huth wrote:

> How can I make that hard disk workable again??

I assume that it still spins up? If so, you may have a good chance
of getting the data off of it.

Have you tried Disk Warrior?
http://www.alsoft.com
Sometimes Disk Warrior can resurrect a drive like magic.

If Disk Warrior doesn't help, you can often retrieve your data with a
good utility such as:

Data Rescue II
http://lookleap.com/prosofteng.com/a1

Randy B. Singer • Mac OS X Routine Maintenance • http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html

Udo wrote:

>
> Hello all,
>
> I have added a 160 GB hard disk to my Power Mac G4 MDD. After trying
to
> have
> SuperDuper make a backup of my main drive to that hard disk I cannot
> access it any
> more and it isn't displayed on the desktop.
...
 
> Disk Utility cannot repair the drive. It displays the error "Invalid
> node size of the B-tree-header"

Something like Alsoft Disk Warrior may be able to repair the damage.

Harro de Jong

This may not be helpful in your case, but SuperDuper recommends erasing the external hard drive to zeros before copying. That process is supposed to map out bad sections of the drive.

SpinRite (grc.com) is pretty good at this kind of recovery, but you have to run it on a PC. Probably cheaper to replace the driver, though, if you're not trying to recover data.