Disk Recovery/First Aid

Try repairing the drive instead of verifying it. Verifying will not fix anything.

Usually when this happens I just re-partition the drive (witch erases the hard drive) and then re-install the OS. most of the time that work. If it doesn't I take it to an Apple Store to get fixed. Is the drive making any kind of loud unusual nosies?

Obviously any attempt at data recovery has to happen before erasing the drive. In Disk Utility have you tried clickin on the effected drive and then clicking the mount button? Some times it can take a few minute to show up.

If it won't mount there are some 3rd party programs you could try using:

The safest option is do an exact bit clone the drive to an external Drive and then. Use one of the pogroms on the clone drive.

For instance Data Rescue 3. Before purchasing it, it would make sense to talk to ProSoft, tell them your hard drive symptoms and see if they recommend the product for your issue. Data Rescue has some repair tools, it also has data recover tools.

There is also DiskWarrior 4, DiskWarrior will try to repair the disk. It may not work.If DiskWarrior fails, the drive could be even more scrambled. Again you can contact the manufacture. In this case Alsoft, and see Alsoft would would recommend their software for the hard drive issue.

There are also companies that you can ship the drive to, to see if they can recover your data off the drive. For Instance Drive Savers.

Good luck!

statichue wrote:

At first the macbook began running very slow.

So I opened the Disk Utility and tried to verify the disk.

When it tries to verify the catalog file,

it breaks, reporting the error "Invalid Node Structure"...

..."Rebuilding Catalog-B tree"

at that point, the progress bar just hangs there, and

just keeps returning "Invalid Record Count" lines

Also, the Macintosh HD is unmountable.

So, do you think I have a hardware problem with the HD?

It's hard to say whether there is a hardware problem. TeenTitan wrote a nice list of the progression of troubleshooting. Disk Utility is the first line, but is somewhat weak. I have DiskWarrior and that's the next thing I try. If it fixes the disk, then wait some more. If the problem was a one-time software glitch, it should not happen again. But if the problems come back, or if DiskWarrior or a similarly powerful utility was not able to fix the problem, at that point it is probably not safe to continue using that disk.

statichue wrote:

It's fine if I have to replace it, but

how should I approach backing up the data if I can't mount the disk?

That's a hard question. The disk has to be able to mount before it can be backed up. But you should try anyway. I just replaced the hard drive on my friend's MBP. It would not boot, but when I took the drive out and placed it inside a FireWire drive dock connected to my Mac, her disk did mount, and I was able to copy all of the data (as far a I can tell) to her replacement drive. So I guess sometimes a drive might work in a dock or enclosure even though it isn't working in the laptop itself.

Fortunately, it's easy to take the disk out of current MacBook Pros. Then, to do the copy, you just need a cable for bare drives, an empty enclosure, or drive dock. You can get cheap ones, but I like the ones with FireWire 800 because they're so much faster. Then you just use Apple Disk Utility, SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to do your backup.