osx - unrecoverable root partition when used as a second hard drive

07
2014-07
  • JavaRed

    What I did with my Macbook, I removed DVD driver ant mounted my old macbook hard drive there. BTW, my old disk was split into 2 partitions: root and data. root partition is where system files and my applications installed, and data my pictures, music, videos etc.

    My problem is, after I mounted old disk, my Macbook recognized and mounted old disk data partition, but it can't mount root partition. When I try to mount it from Disk Utility it says: (btw I needed to change my old partition name from "root" to "data" to prevent a confusion because my new root partition is named "root" as well):

    Error. This disk needs to be repaired. Click repair disk.

Verify and Repair volume "data"
Checking file system
Checking journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid node structure
The volume could not be verified completely.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk utility can't repair this disk....disk, and restore your backed-up files.

    So as much as I understand and if OS X is similar to Linux, I can understand it won't allow to 2 active partitions. But I don't know how to repair this. Is there any way to recover my old root partition? I don't have backups of all file.

    Thanks.

    • Answers
  • Peter Horvath

    I think it is some hw problem. In your place I booted the macbook with an ubuntu live cd to try to back up my data. Don't worry (too much), I gave 90% that your data on your old hd is yet intact. There must be some other problem. First you should be sure, that it is the situation.

    I don't think it is some partition naming or such trivial problem, but the exact type of your problem can't be determined based on your question.

    In such cases I see some type of hw incompatibility, or bad blocks, or contact problem between the drive and the laptop the most probable.

    Linux can see the mac partitions, thus first you will know if is some fs problem or a hw error. In the best case you will get access to your old data.

    P.s.: macbooks can be booted only with 32bit ubuntu livecd easily.


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  • dtj

    I have a Western Digital hard drive that's about 4 or 5 years old. It's 500 GB, USB. I use it to backup my Mac every so often. I had it partitioned: 1 side for full backups, and the other side for general storage of music, installers, etc.

    I decided to get rid of the partition today and dump all the data. So I opened disk utility, and hit 'erase'. It started thinking and then disk utility crashed. After the crash, the hard drive won't mount, however disk utility still sees the drive, but not the individual volume within.

    I tried booting up Disk Warrior and no luck there either. It has the drive as an "unknown drive". When I hit rebuild, it goes through all it steps and then stops cause of this error:

    The drive "unknown" is severely damaged and DiskWarrior is unable to determine its case sensitivity

    What can I do at this point? There isn't any physical damage to the drive. Never been dropped or anything.


    • Related Answers
  • Chris - Armor-IT

    Is there anything on the drive you still need to retrieve? Or would running a fresh backup solve your current issues?

    If nothing is on it you can't simply rerun a backup of, then forget diskwarrior and reformat the drive. If, however, you have unique files on the drive and require them I would suggest running a long generic test using Seatools from www.seagate.com. If it fails, it may be time to enlist a pro like myself to aid your efforts. If it passes, I have posted a simple article nearly a year ago that explains the use of a slightly more advanced recovery program from Stellar. It's not perfect but garners the best results of any publicly available Macintosh data recovery program I've come across in recent years.

    Let me know how you make out, or reply if you have further questions.