I need to find an OSX 10.5.8 installation disk (an older imac) for disk utility, any idea's?

Try Amazon or eBay, but make sure the disk is the retail version, black face with a silver or grey X on the face.

You have an Intel machine. Save money and buy Snow Leopard to upgrade the OS.

Upgrading to Snow Leopard

You can purchase Snow Leopard through the Apple Store: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard - Apple Store (U.S.). The price is $19.99 plus tax. You will be sent physical media by mail after placing your order.

After you install Snow Leopard you will have to download and install the Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1 to update Snow Leopard to 10.6.8 and give you access to the App Store. Access to the App Store enables you to download Mountain Lion if your computer meets the requirements.

Snow Leopard General Requirements

1. Mac computer with an Intel processor

2. 1GB of memory

3. 5GB of available disk space

4. DVD drive for installation

5. Some features require a compatible Internet service provider;

fees may apply.

6. Some features require Apple’s MobileMe service; fees and

terms apply.

If you want to move up to a newer Mac OS X, and have an Intel iMac per your posting in that group, you can purchase Snow Leopard, 10.6, from the Apple on-line store for $20. From that if your computer qualifies yo can move up to Lion.

You should not attempt to upgrade to a newer operating system without first repairing your file system error.

Have a look at this article:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1417?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US

You can follow the instructions for running fsck and you can do this without buying anything and without changing your operating system. I believe fsck will fix the problem that you have encountered.

If you do obtain the 10.6 upgrade disk, you should boot from it but before upgrading, first run Disk utility from that upgrade disk and repair the hard disk. The repair you ran earlier was repairing PERMISSIONS, but you need to repair the disk itself. The fsck command does this without requiring you to boot from an install CD or DVD.

There is no way what so ever you can repair physical damage to a disk. What you are doing running Disk Utility and fsck is repairing the file system structure. While it may seem advantageous to run fsck over Disk Utility, in reality Disk Utility is nothing more than a GUI under which fsck runs. For the vast majority of users, Disk Utility is the way to go as they do not have to understand Unix commands and use of the Terminal. To run fsck you must run from a Terminal window. and must understand file systems and file system structure or you can make a huge mess of the system.

After more than 25 years of Unix use and administration I would never suggest an untrained user resort to using Unix command level operations.

Ralph Landry1 wrote:

There is no way what so ever you can repair physical damage to a disk. What you are doing running Disk Utility and fsck is repairing the file system structure. While it may seem advantageous to run fsck over Disk Utility, in reality Disk Utility is nothing more than a GUI under which fsck runs. For the vast majority of users, Disk Utility is the way to go as they do not have to understand Unix commands and use of the Terminal. To run fsck you must run from a Terminal window. and must understand file systems and file system structure or you can make a huge mess of the system.

After more than 25 years of Unix use and administration I would never suggest an untrained user resort to using Unix command level operations.

You're wrong here on several counts.

* No one was discussing physical damage to the disk. The error was an "invalid directory item count" which cannot be fixed by repairing disk permissions and is a file system error. It should be fixed before updating or upgrading the OS.

* The preferred method to fix is running Disk Utility, with its GUI, not fsck. However the poster indicated that he did not have another disk to boot from from which he could run Disk Utility. As the Apple Support Article indicates that I pointed him to, an alternative when the needed boot disk is not available is to run fsck.

* Knowledge of the file system structure is not required to run fsck, nor is 25 years of unix experience required! I've walked 10-year olds through that on the telephone, and Apple itself recommends it when the boot CD/DVD is not available. To run fsck, one boots holding down command-S, one types "fsck -fy" (more than once if need be), then one types "reboot". This does not take 25 years of unix experience.

Good luck Kevin. Really tough run of luck you are having.

Be sure to make a good backup of your MBP. A really good approach is to have your external drive partitioned into two partitions, one for TM and one for a clone of the internal drive. Use something like Carbon Copy Cloner, they charge for it now but you can use it free for 30-days to decide if you like it. CCC will not only clone the internal drive, but with Lion and Mountain Lion will also clone the Recovery Hard Drive. And the clone is bootable so if the internal fails, just bootup on the external.

It is POSSIBLE that the failed user login plus the other things not working will come back when you fix the file system errors. If you're not comfortable trying to fix those yourself, you can take your computer to an Apple Store and have them do it. Before doing that, and in fact before doing anything more, you should make a clone-type backup of what you have now, right away, as Ralph suggested. That's in case things degrade further.

If you want to try to fix the file system error(s) yourself, you have some options:

* obtain a 10.6 install/upgrade disk -- boot from it but instead of upgrading the OS, first use Disk Utility which comes also on that disk. These disks are about $20 from Apple.

* obtain Disk Warrior (online or from an Apple Store or other computer vendors) and boot from its CD and then rebuild the entire file system. Disk Warrior can solve some file system problems that Apple's tools cannot. Disk Warrior costs about $90.

* run fsck yourself, as instructed further above

In terms of triaging all this, it is actually quite possible that all those picture and music and video files in that failed user account are still physically there on your drive, you just can't easily access them since that user can't log in. There are ways around that, tools that will make that user's files visible and accessible from other user logins. That's something to try later when other repair steps fail to make that user login work.

P.S. Another option is to purchase Tech Tool Pro, which can check your computer's hardware and also fix the file system errors. It costs about as much as Disk Warrior.

Can Disk Warrior or tech tool pro repair external drives as well? I mean as long as it is not a hardware related error.

Is it really save to use Disk Warrior and Tech Tool Pro? I often hear that (especially freeware) system tune up software does more bad than good.

Do these Tools more than freeware or the Apple Tools can do?

I remembeer though that with older Macs the Apple-Hardware-Test-CDs most often find nothing and are useless. Recently I read more and more people use an old ASD CD/DVD, though this should actually be illegal, if I am right, or has that changed?

Yes, DW and TTP can be used on other than the startup drive...just select the drive/volume to be serviced.

The Apple Hardware Test is good at finding serious problems, or pinpointing the source of problems A great many things get past it, though. There really is no substitute for the diagnostic tools the Apple store genius bar techs use.