repair / rebuild damaged .sparsebundle

Hi,

I tried your suggestion but as with all mount tries I get the following error:

hdiutil: attach failed - no mountable file systems

I can attach the image with the -nomount option and disk utility can even see it then but I cannot repair it (since he does not beleive there is a file system on/in it)

So thanks for the tip, I will use the shadow option once I got it up and running for safety, bu for now no luck 😟

The image was build on the same machine I am trying to mount it on right now. Allthough it was uildbij TM offcourse and not manually or through some other tool. The only difference really is that I used netatalk to share an AFP drive from my linux boc when I ran TM. SInce the machine crash netatalk has died on me as well and I am now using SMB to present the direcotry to my mac. This should not change anyting really since they are merely different protocols, they've got nothing to do with the underlaying filesystem.

Oh, btw, it is a G4 powerbook, both installs were (offcourse) OSX 10.5 (hence timemachine ;)) so no intel stuff here. I am beginning to worry that th image might be beyond repair indeed. The only reason I can think this beeing the case hoewer is when the header of the image was damaged (or certain config files or smth) since having a few broken datablocks (sparse image creates 8mb blocks) should be a recoverable error IMHO. If not, then this design *****, pardon my french, and Apple should REALLY fix that deficiency.

-P

Finally! some succes, and thanks for the tips Ken 🙂

Ok, what I did:

I took the damaged .sparsebundle direcotry from my network drive and copied it over to my iMac (has the largest disk). I then mounted, sorry, attached the image like with

*hdiutil attach -nomount (imagefile) -shadow /tmp/test.shadow*

Then I borrowed a copy of data rescue II form a collegue and switched to expert mode. There I could select the image file and did a thorough scan. This took like 8 hours or so (since the image is virtually 894GB) but in the end it had found a lot of files, some including filenames and atributes, some only identified by type (and thus named by the program for example: mp300001.mp3) and a whole load of orphaned file. These files are strangely cut up if they are larger then 1GB (I had quite a large image file which was chopped up) but for the most part a whole lot of files were dumped into these folders with their name intact so I could sort through them. Seeing as I have some 20.000 directories filled with them allready I had better write some script for it...

Suffice it to say that it was not a usable image anymore that TM could use in any way. Fortunatly the program did recognize such things as iTunes library, applemail and so on. I am currently recovering all files to a directory outside the image and from there I will be manually sorting things out.

So far so good, but be warned all of you using sparse images! When you have a few bad sectors or as in my case a non-clean disk in your array with plain files, chances are you can recover a lot of them. With a disk image like in my case a few of the wrong files get damaged and you loose a LOT of data. In my case I would estimate about 60% (most of those thank god were programs and library files which I can simply reinstall from dvd/cd). In other words: it is better to go to some length of effort to make TM backups in the way TM was originally meant; files or hardlinks, not images!

-P