Disk Utility vs Disk Warrior - Doesn't make any sense - Page 2

krs · May 8th, 2010, 03:29 PM

All right - did the following:

Erased a 200 GB partition on the second internal 1.5 TB drive.
BTW - I had used both of these fairly new 1.5 internal TB drives regularly as both a boot disk, the smaller partition, and a storage disk since I bought them a lttle while back with no indication that there might be anything wrong with either one of them.
So I rather doubt this is a hard drive issue.
Anyway - started to do the zeroing on that second disk I was going to use to clone to but it came up telling me this would take a bit ocer an hour (and I didn't have the time) I just opted to do a straight erase and the cloned the external drive to that second internal 1.5 TB using Super Duper and doing a complete clone.
Well - 4 hours and 19 minutes later the clone was done - SD told me it was happy so I went through the option start-up routine.
The newly cloned disk (with SD this time) shows up - I select it to boot up, the grey screen with the Apple logo comes up....and sits there.
Usually one gets a little spinning cogwheel below the logo and then the Mac start-up progress bar - nothing!
After about 5 minutes (I decided to be real patient) I decide this isn't going anywhere so I shut the Mac down, boot up on the external and select the new SD cloned internal as the satrt up disk. It showed up as one of the start up disks under system preferences - Great.
I then boot up normally (not holding any keys down doring boot up) and what do I get? A disk icon with a blinking question mark, ie can't find an OS to boot from.
So then I boot back up on the external and run Disk Warrior on the SD cloned internal.
Don't I get essentially the same message as before, rebuilt directory successfully but can't replace it.
Now I haven't run DW on the external which would probably the next step - however, I want to make sure I don't loose my current data so I decided to take yet another different hard drive, an older 120 GB IDE internal, erase it, install OS 10.4 from the retail disk I have and then use Migration Assistant to transfer everything.
That took exactly 3 1/2 hours including the checking of the install DVD - all told about an hour faster than the SD clone - wonder why - I thought it would take longer.
Anyway, checked the new install and the files and folders - quick check showed all OK
That's where I am right now and I can't do much more since I'm off on a week long trip shortly.
Question - is there a free application that can check my internal hard drives? Maybe TechTool that came with Applecare?
Although I doubt that there is a hard drive problem it's probably a logical thing to verify for sure.
SMART comes back fine on all internal drives.

Paddy · May 8th, 2010, 10:09 PM

krs, sounds to me like there is something wrong with the drive you're cloning from - hence my earlier suggestion that you do what you essentially just did with the IDE drive.

Do a fresh install on the internal drive, then use Migration Assistant to move the files you need from the external.

And run DW on that external - I won't be surprised if it shows issues. At any rate, you need to get a good functioning internal startup again, and the best way to do that is to do a clean install.

I doubt TechTool will show anything different than what you've seen already. My suspicions rest with the OS system files, not with the hardware, but if it provides some peace of mind, run the hardware test disk that came with the Mac, if you have it.

krs · May 10th, 2010, 07:23 PM

	Quote:			Originally Posted by Paddy
	krs, sounds to me like there is something wrong with the drive you're cloning from - ,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

I keep thinking that as well, however, if that is the case I don't understand why this supposed external problem drive works fine with two different Macs, the basic AGP G4 I normally use and riht now with a 700 MHz eMac.
In either case the Mac boots up fine and works fine with either Mac but when I do a clone from this drive, the clone doesn't work.
And it doesn't work in rather strange ways as I explained earlier.
If the directory as so badly damaged that DW can't fix it, which do I see none of that when I'm actually using that drive.
There is obviously a good technical explanation for all this, but what is it ????

All of this will become a moot point in a few weeks since I finally gave up waiting for Apple to come out with a "mini-tower" and have bought a Mac Mini to replace my old G4.
I'll put my two 1.5 TB drives into a FW800 enclosure, that plus a USB Elgato (or equivalent) stick should give me the same functionality as the G4 except that it will be a lot faster and ready for the next Apple OSs beyond Snow Leopard.