One complaint I have about Apple and OS/X
Jun. 11th, 2005 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gizaWell, I finally found something about Macs that I don't like very much.
Awhile back, Kito (dude, get an LJ!) was asking me some questions in IM about how to fix his iMac, which had been having some problems lately. When I was unable to help him fix it through "remote hands", I asked him to bring it over.
The first thing I did was to try starting it up normally. That didn't work so well. It just hung when the progress bar was about halfway through. So the next thing I tried was starting it up in Single User Mode, done by holding down Command-S when starting the machine. As the machine booted, I saw some lines like this about halfway down the screen:
In case it's hard to read, the above text says:
Okay, that's not so good, especially since it would only mount the disk in read only mode. However, this is the sort of thing that the fsck can fix, right! In fact, the message right before the bash prompt appears even tells me how to run fsck. So I gave that a try:
Well, that was interesting, unexpected, and a little depressing.
I tried running fsck a few more times, but didn't have much luck.
I then figured that since the problem is apparently in the file system's journal, maybe I could turn off journaling and run fsck against that:
Again, very interesting. When I tried using hfs.util to turn off journaling, it said that the volume isn't journaled. When I tried using it turn journaling on, it said that the volume was not an HFS+ volume.
At this point, I investigated the idea of booting from the OS/X 10.3 install CD and reinstalling OS/X. One would assume that the volume is formatted in the process and this problem would go away. But lo and behold, when I got the list of volumes to appear, the icon for the hard drive was there, but it was grayed out and could not be selected. I guess the installer doesn't like messing with file systems that are in an unstable state. That's a bad design choice, IMHO.
I finally did some Googling on those errors, and discovered only one way to fix this problem. Other people suffered the same thing, and the only fix was to purchase and use a program called Disk Warrior. Disk Warrior comes with a bootable CD, which you can start from and use it to fix your file system.
I'm not happy that this problem could not be fixed with the tools that came with OS/X. I hope that Apple does something about that soon.
Awhile back, Kito (dude, get an LJ!) was asking me some questions in IM about how to fix his iMac, which had been having some problems lately. When I was unable to help him fix it through "remote hands", I asked him to bring it over.
The first thing I did was to try starting it up normally. That didn't work so well. It just hung when the progress bar was about halfway through. So the next thing I tried was starting it up in Single User Mode, done by holding down Command-S when starting the machine. As the machine booted, I saw some lines like this about halfway down the screen:
In case it's hard to read, the above text says:
BSD root: disk0s3, major 15, minor 2
jnl: replay_journal: from: 8385024 to: 3450880 (joffset 0xe1000)
jnl: replay_journal: bad block list header @ 0x7400 (checksum 0x100077 != 0xfec6734d)
jnl: journal_open: Error replaying the journal!
hfs: early jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).
Okay, that's not so good, especially since it would only mount the disk in read only mode. However, this is the sort of thing that the fsck can fix, right! In fact, the message right before the bash prompt appears even tells me how to run fsck. So I gave that a try:
** /dev/rdisk0s3
** Root file system
** Checking HFS Plus volume.
** Checking Extents Overflow file.
** Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
(4, 12533)
** Volume check failed.
Well, that was interesting, unexpected, and a little depressing.
I tried running fsck a few more times, but didn't have much luck.
I then figured that since the problem is apparently in the file system's journal, maybe I could turn off journaling and run fsck against that:
Again, very interesting. When I tried using hfs.util to turn off journaling, it said that the volume isn't journaled. When I tried using it turn journaling on, it said that the volume was not an HFS+ volume.
At this point, I investigated the idea of booting from the OS/X 10.3 install CD and reinstalling OS/X. One would assume that the volume is formatted in the process and this problem would go away. But lo and behold, when I got the list of volumes to appear, the icon for the hard drive was there, but it was grayed out and could not be selected. I guess the installer doesn't like messing with file systems that are in an unstable state. That's a bad design choice, IMHO.
I finally did some Googling on those errors, and discovered only one way to fix this problem. Other people suffered the same thing, and the only fix was to purchase and use a program called Disk Warrior. Disk Warrior comes with a bootable CD, which you can start from and use it to fix your file system.
I'm not happy that this problem could not be fixed with the tools that came with OS/X. I hope that Apple does something about that soon.