Kernel panic > hd appears to be damaged > reboot without dvd?
Hi everyone,
I came home to an unpleasant surprise this evening as I was confronted with the "You need to restart your computer because of a problem" error. This is the first time this has happened.
It turns out my HD needs to be restored:
The red messages read:
- Invalid number of files on volume
- Invalid number of volume directories
- Error: this hard drive needs to be restored. Restart the computer from a different disk (eg the installationdisk) and use disk utility to restore the drive.
I have already repaired permissions but that did not change anything.
Some questions that I now have are:
1. I do not have my original Mac OSX install disk. I read that with OSX 10.6.8., there is no way to be able to restore without that disk or without help of a mac store. Is that correct? Is my only/best option to schedule an appointment?
2. I do have Time Machine backups on an external hard drive, but that alone isn't enough to boot from right? I only have backups there, but no system boot files.
3. How likely is it that this is "just some mismatch of digits" that comes with age and is easily fixed, versus "the disk is about to die on you"?
4. If something goes wrong, how much of a challenge will it be to restore from my TM backup disk? I have a lot of audio software and years worth of work on my computer and am afraid to loose my data or having to reinstall/relicense all my software.
5. Is it possible to continue to work with this hard disk for another couple of days before I can get it fixed, or would you advise against that?
If needed I can post the panic log, but because the issue seems clear I didn't think that would add much.
Any help is much appreciated! Thanks a lot.
Macbook Pro 13" 2.53 ghz intel core2duo