My PowerBook decided it wasn't going to recognise the hard disk on Tuesday morning… a PRAM reset (on Dad's recommendation) seemed to fix it, but there were disk errors. Thankfully, no mechanical problems!
I tried a number of times to fix it using Disk Utility and Disk Warrior, but got some error about the journal when trying to replace the directory…
*… must back up more often …*
The only solution I could see was to backup the disk, wipe it, and then do a restore. Unfortuantely, I didn't have an external drive! After shopping around for a bit, I order a 250Gb Icecube Generation II Firewire 400/USB2 hard disk from Express Powermac Solutions, which arrived this morning at work.
I'm currently doing a disk copy from the internal drive to a partition on the external, using a similar command to what Christoph used when his drive died:
dd bs=512 if=/dev/disk0s3 of=/dev/disk1s3 conv=noerror,sync
Hopefully it'll work. *fingers crossed*
This is probably the fourth or fifth time I've had to do a reformat in the past 2 1/2 years with this computer. I don't know what the frequency is for others, but it seems like a lot to me. What I want to know is, why does this corruption still occur? We've got complex filesystems and journalling, but still, every now and then, the "catalog" or "catalog hierarchy" manages to shoot itself in the foot, scrambling a few bits and rendering the drive unusable. Argh! Why can't these damn things be more reliable?!
UPDATE: I didn't mention this earlier, but the hard disk in the machine is dead. *sigh* Attempts to erase and re-partition it in Disk Utility (or using the diskutil command) have resulted in time-outs. Luckily, I got all my data onto the external drive, but I have a PowerBook than is now literally chained to the desk! I'm hoping to swap out the drive with an old one early next week. Dammit.
