Preserved Topic: Anybody who knows mac-NEEDED IMMEDIATELY

Is anyone around with mac knowledge that can help me?

Well that was a helpful post

Yeah, a more descriptive post might generate more constructive feedback.

It's your God, they're your rules, YOU go to Hell.

I've somehow lost my hard drive and I didn't want to get into it if nobody was online. Steve, I was looking for you. Somehow my system folder got corrupted and I went to restart and it doesn't recognize my drive. I am 5 days out of tech support and I've started up from the system cd, ran disk utilities and it says it can't mount "Jeni" cuz of

quote:

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Problem: Invalid extent entry, 8, 0.

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So disk first aid can't fix it-big surprise. Try to start from Norton 6.0 cd. No dice. If you don't know, NU 6.0 has that bug with OS 9.1. So I was wondering, got any other ideas before we send this out to be fixed?

Thanks..

:: j e n i ::
fist-eater

[This message has been edited by Jeni (edited 06-13-2001).]

How big a crisis is this, time-wise? (I *know* how big a crisis this is emotionally!)

The one software tool that has saved my bacon repeatedly is DiskWarrior. It can rebuild the file catalog. I don't know what that error message you got means, but if the Mac will boot from the CD it doesn't seem to be a hardware issue. Hopefully some directory files got scrambled and Disk Warrior might be able to straighten things out. It has worked for me is all I can say. On numerous machines with a variety of system versions. And it's simple.
Alsoft: http://www.alsoft.com/

Plus Optimizer is also a very excellent drive optimization utility, but that's for another day.

Jeez - hope this helps, and hope the machine doesn't have files you have to work on in the next hour!!

I've got a meeting I need to leave for in a few minutes, so won't be able to get back to you for a bit, but check out Alsoft and see if they can help.

Good luck!

Steve-Thanks. Time is of the essence, always. We don't have disk warrior and I'm sure my boss would rather send the computer over to a repair place than order and wait for software. I managed to hook up an external cd drive so that I could start up from the OS cd and have NU cd in at the same time. Norton is plugging away as we speak...I'll let you know how all goes.

And of course, it does have files I need to be working on, but nothing due in the next hour (thankfully). Nothing that can't be retrieved from earlier versions off back up (I'm a good girl). I'd just lose my work mainly to my website and other personal stuff, and oh, let's not forget...Hours spent reinstalling software and updates...


Thanks again

I had some luck with a similar Mac problem once where I attempted to re-install the OS on the bad drive, using a clean install. I pushed right past the "bad place" and was able to do a nice clean install of a new system folder, the old one was still there and fine, simply renamed. If this is going to fail, it'd fail in the first couple seconds, with an error something like "Invalid extent entry", heh. Really, best of lucks to you, I know how traumatic these things can be.

Your pal, -doc-

Your pal, -doc-

Welp got my hard drive to mount. Norton said there were like 30 major errors. Now I still get a flashing ? icon when I start up, so it can start up from my hard drive. I have a couple more things to try. I feel so much better, knowing that I can get to my files, just have to work out the start-up thing. Thanks so much Steve and "O" for your support.

Jeni- A disk icon with a blinking question mark indicates that your mac cannot find the system software it needs to start up.
Your computer may have some problem recognizing some external equipment.

Shut down the computer and turn off all external equipment and disconnect the first SCSI device in the chain from your computers SCSI port.
Then rerstart...if the computer starts up without the blinking question mark you have found the problem.

Sometimes if you hold down the Shift key and reboot(hold the shift key and wait till you see the Extensions Disabled in the startup window) it turns off all Extensions and Control Panels except the basic OS and may indicate an extension conflict.

If none of these remedies work you may have to do a Clean Install of the system software.

Disk First Aid is a piece of crap...
Reformatting with FWB Hardisk Toolkit is the way to go.

When you startup with a disk formatted with FWB it will do a disk integrety check and warn you if there are any problems prior to disk failure so you can get it repaired with Norton or DiskWarrior befor it goes belly up.

Just one more thing...
I have made a Bootable Rescue Disk CD and Zip Disk which includes
Norton, TechTool Pro, FWB Hardisk Toolkit, DiskWarrior and Mac OS installers...
Doesn't hurt to cover your ass...


Hope it helps...



[This message has been edited by kromaZ (edited 06-13-2001).]

Kromaz- Thanks for your input. I have no external devices connected. I have zapped my PRAM, updated my HD Drivers, and disabling extensions does no good. The question mark comes up long before it ever cycles through the extensions. I am currently doing a clean install of the OS. If that doesn't work, I'm gonna have to just pull my files and send this computer outside for work. I've already spent half a day on it...

Oh good. Sounds like you're gonna walk away relatively unharmed.

Aren't you glad you use a mac that never ever crashes or burns?


I'd still recommend buying DiskWarrior. For the next time .... And KromZ - I made a bootable bail-out disk too. Don't have NU, but do have tech tool and Disk Warrior on it. I'm really not a deep-tech guy, so what DiskWarrior is doing is sorta mysterious to me, but the bottom line is it makes Macs which have suffered some sort of knock to the head work again and I'm not going to question how or why!

Jeni!

Good to hear that you have made your backup-homework (I think its a real pain to deal with all the tapes but when something like this happens your....happy)

I had a similar problem a couple of months ago where everything crashed like that. I tried NU but it didn´t help. Then tried Disk Warrior which, as Steve said, rebuilds your file cataloge. After that I was able to mount but right after startup everthing freezed. So i started without extensions and started to throw out things I figured I didn´t need. The problem was a PDF-file I had sent for printing a couple of minutes before crash. I threw out that printjob and after that it was ok. Dont ask me why it happened but I know a couple of people who had the same problem. I asked my support about this and he also says that if you can boot from a CD its most likely not a hardware issue.

For bigger problems I always use Disk Warrior and Tech Tools. TT checks your hardware and Disk Warrior rebuilds your file cataloge. NU is good for fragmented discs. Since we got our bootable CD with these softwares we´ve only called for support once (that´s when my colleague crashed his keyboard over his knees. Disk Warrior couldn´t fix that...)

Best of luck to you!

/Tommy

I haven't got any mayor disk crashes yet, but I can imagine how bad it can be... I once lost a 50 (yes) megabyte *psd where I worked over a week on...

: : Mahjqa : :

Always outnumbered, never outgunned.

Tommy -- I love reading your posts! Many's the time I've felt like cracking my keyboard over my knees, but since I do most of my work on a laptop, that would be .... bad.

Well, actually it´s not the end of the story. Our business system totally crashed and he tried to recover it but it didn´t work out the way he planned so the next day he kicked the scanner so it was history too (he´s not crazy, just got a bad temper). Next day everyone came to the office wearing hockey helmets with a small sign on it: "Im not software, please don´t kill me". He also got a laptop now...
He´s much more calmer nowadays though, knock on wood. He is a unixprogrammer from the start so now when OS X is out he is happy like a little kid who just got a new toy.

Wouldn´t btw try to break a laptop over my knees, that would indeed be bad. Especially if you have the new power book titanium. Titanium is tough to break, believe me, I´ve tried with my golfclub a couple of times which is titanium and it has, against all odds, survived so far.

/Tommy


[This message has been edited by Tommy (edited 06-14-2001).]

I'm trying to reconcile these hilarious anecdotes with my preconceptions of scandanavians!

Hey: do you still call it an iron if it's made of titanium?

Well I can understand that this doesn´t fit with your "picture" of cold scandinavians. Maybe it could be appropriate to say that the "Bruce Lee" owns the company...

I dont call it iron, I call it a driver. But he/she/it deserves a more talented owner than me, that´s obvious.
Was that what you wanted to know??

/Tommy

Just wanted to make sure you weren't going to call it a wood!