When bad things happen to good Mac's [OT]

[Joseph E. Sacco, PhD]

Had an OS X 10.3.9 disaster the other day. OS X was no longer able to
boot. 

The boot sequence would start,  the gear would spun, and then a dialog
would  appear telling you in several languages to reboot the machine.
What to do????

(1) Try Apple's disk repair utility
[boot up off 10.3.0 install disk]

Apple's disk repair utility is known to be rather "weak".

The good news:
        problem identified : "keys out of order"

which means some B-Tree records or associated records have been damaged.

The bad news:
        Apple's disk repair was unable to correct the problem

(2) Boot up in single user mode and run fsck
Well..., OSX is a flavor of UNIX [:-)]. Holding down Command-s
immediately after the boot tone will get you to single user mode. 

Running

        /sbin/fsck -f -y

is the right thing to do for an hfsplus file system with journaling
enabled.

The good news:
        fsck confirmed that the problem was indeed "keys out of order"

The bad news:
        fsck was unable to correct the problem.

(3) Pause and consider options
- reinstall
reload the OS including all of the 10.3.x updates and all applications
[hear a loud sucking sound...]

- update the OS to 10.4 and hope that the update process magically
"fixes" things:
        * deem highly unlikely
        * MAC does not have a DVD drive.
        DVD is the only media format shipped by Apple. 
        If you want OSX 10.4 on CD's, you need to send Apple $10, *and*
        the purchased OS X 10.4 DVD, and a proof of purchase coupon. 
        [Apple is not very trusting, eh???]
        
- search the web to see what others have done to resolve "keys out of
order problem".
        * learn the problem is ubiquitous
        * anecdotal evidence suggests "Disk Warrior" from Alsoft may
        solve the problem.

(4) purchase copy of "Disk Warrior" 3.0.3.

(5) run Disk Warrior.

	==> all is  well once more.

-Joseph

-- 
joseph_sacco [at] comcast [dot] net