What do do when disk utilities fail?

First off, Norton Disk Doctor can damage Mac OS X hard disks, and any hard disk running 8.1 or higher. You just happened to lose the game of Russian Roulette a little later than others. If your data is not backed up, get Prosoft Data Rescue and an external Firewire hard disk to attempt to recover your data to. If it is unable to make that data usable, get Alsoft Disk Warrior 3.0.3.

In the future always backup your data if you haven't been already as my FAQ explains:

http://www.macmaps.com/backup.html

Hi, Howard -

If any utility can recover your hard drive, Alsoft's DiskWarrior will be able to. It is very safe to use, and has been able to recover a drive from damage done to it by Norton Disk Doctor. It may take a while - the last 'record' time I saw posted for DiskWarrior repairing a drive was something like 12 or 14 days, but it finally did fix it.

The problem with Norton Disk Doctor is that it does not understand OSX well enough to be allowed near it. NDD tends to 'fix' things it does not understand. It can be risky to use NDD on a drive whose latest OS (including OS 9 versions) is newer than the latest one on the Norton Utilities CD.

In particular, NDD should never be used on any drive which contains OSX.

Okay -- so DiskWarrior ties up your computer for 2 weeks while it does it's thing?

If your hard drive directory is disastrously scrambled, DW can take days to sort things out, but in 95%-99% of all cases it takes oonly a few minutes. Norton Disk Doctor is perfectly capable of scrambling it disastrously, but if your Mac still starts up and runs, things probably aren't that bad yet.

A damaged directory makes it likely that there will be some loss of data if you simply copy the entire drive to a backup disk now. The bad directory means the OS can't properly locate every file that it knows is supposed to be on your hard drive, so some of them aren't going to be copied properly. It might be just one insignificant file, or dozens or hundreds of important ones, that are damaged in part or lost altogether in backing up. The ideal time to back up your drive is when you know it's all in good order.

Erasing your hard drive will also erase the bad directory, so it's an alternative solution to the problem if your data is already backed up. Copying the contents of a backup that you make now, with a damaged directory, back onto your internal drive after erasing it won't fix any files that have already been corrupted, but it will at least copy everything — damaged or not — back into a new, undamaged directory.

Do be aware if you have a Mac that will boot into Mac OS 9, and choose to erase it for use with Mac OS X and Mac OS 9 booting, you will want to install the Mac OS 9 drivers before installing Mac OS X itself, as this article explains:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75275

For other tips on migrating from 9 to X, see my FAQ:

http://www.macmaps.com/macosxnative.html

Hi, Howard -

I did not mean to indicate that DiskWarrior takes an inordinate amount of time to do what it does. As eww pointed out, usually it takes but a few minutes.

In cases where the directory has been seriously damaged, so much so that the drive is no longer usable as a boot drive or (sometimes) even be accessible from another boot volume, DW can take a while to make repairs - sometimes days if the damage is extremely bad.

If the drive is still usable as a boot drive, it should not take DW long to fix it.

Many folk use DW regularly as part of their routine preventive maintenance in order to catch errors and damage before it gets worse.

Howard: Everything you install on a freshly erased hard drive will be unfragmented, as will all the free space on the drive when you're finished. As soon as you begin using the drive, fragmentation starts to occur, but it takes a lot of fragmentation to interfere with any normal processes, and OS X defragments most files automatically whenever it's running.

Alsoft makes a fine, inexpensive defragmenter called PlusOptimizer that runs in OS 9. It used to be bundled with DiskWarrior, but now that DW's current version is OS X-based, there's little point in packaging PlusOptimizer with it. PO is only sold separately now. I often recommend it to people who only run OS 9, but people who run OS X any significant fraction of the time don't need it — or any other defragmenter.

I am still a bit confused about some of the Apple language -- disk vs. volume, for example...

A disk is a storage device or the media inside it. A volume is either a whole, undivided disk — a hard drive, CD, DVD, floppy disk, etc — or a partition on a disk that has been partitioned, or a session on a multisession CD. If you partition a hard drive into two partitions or burn two sessions on a CD, two "disk" icons will appear on your desktop, each representing one of the two volumes you've created by dividing the disk.

Are you confused enough now, or shall I keep explaining? ;o)

Pro Tools' fussiness about fragmentation is probably because it creates enormous files and wants to store them in contiguous, unbroken blocks of free space. I wonder whether the OS X-native version of ProTools is any more tolerant. If it is, that would be one good reason to upgrade.

A HD is a volume if it is unpartitioned. If it has 3 partitions, each Partition is a volume.

Cheers, Tom

Initialization is erasing the hard drive completely, and preparing it to reinstall everything.

"What about removing OS 9 from the hard drive and running OS X exclusively. How difficult? Reversible? Any links to walk me through that process?"
Remove Classic cleanly