Can't Boot with Disk Warrior dvd

Hello. A few days ago, I noticed my mac having some issues (beach ball coming up often and for extended periods of time) and eventually getting stuck on the apple start up screen. Now all I get is a folder with a ?. I tried the Disk Utility on my Install Disk, but it said I had an "Invalid B-tree node." So I then heard about Disk Warrior to fix this problem.
I made a Disk Warrior disc using UltraIso and popped it into my drive. When starting my mac, I held down C to boot from the disc. Nothing happened. I tried again holding down Option, and the disc never showed up. I still get the folder with a ?.
How can I get Disk Warrior to work? I'm stuck and I don't want to lose all of my files.

iMac G5 2.4GHz Intel, Mac OS X (10.5.4)

Posted on Nov 27, 2009 10:24 AM

20 replies

Kurt Lang

Level 9

68,602 points

Dec 2, 2009 5:21 PM in response to Mr.KC

I little elaboration on your post.

The new directory cannot replace the original director because of a disk malfunction.

Since the drive is physically bad, DiskWarrior is refusing to write the optimized file table to disk since it's highly likely it would be corrupted while doing so. Which means a bad situation would instantly be much worse.

Then it says "It is highly recommended that you back up all of your data from the preview disk."

The Preview Disk is a pseudo representation of the repaired drive before the data is actually written back to disk. It wants you to save your data from there since it's more likely to correctly write the files you're saving to the backup device.

Now I'm at the preview screen and it's a split type screen.

Back out of the split view so you can mount your external drive. Click the option to view the repaired drive and copy from there.

Mr.KC Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 3, 2009 5:24 AM in response to Kurt Lang

The last part is where I'm having trouble. I have my external hard drive connected but can't figure out how to save my files to it. If I back out of the split screen (both sides say "unknown (preview)"), I just go back to the report.
I restarted and tried to rebuild again and saw that my external drive was now available under the drives to be repaired, so I know it's connected. I just can't figure out how to back up my files. What am I missing?

Kurt Lang

Level 9

68,602 points

Dec 3, 2009 6:55 AM in response to Mr.KC

When you click the Preview button, two drive icons will appear on your desktop. The original and one by the same name with an icon represented by a bare drive with a magnifying glass over it. Double click the latter to open it. You are now working with the pseudo drive, which will behave like any other drive when you click through it. Copy your important files to the external.

This is assuming you've started up from an external drive, or other internal drive or partition with OS X on it. You can't do this while started up from the DiskWarrior CD/DVD. I'm guessing that's what you've done since you don't have a way to choose a drive to copy files between. In which case, you'll need to first get a minimal install of OS X on another drive (not the one you're trying to recover files from of course). Then boot to that drive and copy DiskWarrior to it. Run DiskWarrior from there.

Mr.KC Author

Level 1

4 points

Dec 3, 2009 6:59 AM in response to Kurt Lang

Aahhh, I see. I am booting from the CD. I'm assuming that in order to make a bootable external I would need another mac. Which I don't have.

Kurt Lang

Level 9

68,602 points

Dec 3, 2009 7:06 AM in response to Mr.KC

I'm assuming that in order to make a bootable external I would need another mac. Which I don't have.

Nope, you can do it right from where you are. Intel Macs support booting to either FireWire or USB external drives (I think FireWire is still preferred). Have the external you can install OS onto turned on and boot to the OS X install disk. Choose the external to install OS X to. Once it's done installing, the Mac will automatically boot to the external as the new default drive.

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Can't Boot with Disk Warrior dvd