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hi
i have a little problem with my mac - i recently noticed slower speed, disk is constantly on. i did onyx cleanup and was advised to check start up volume. after performing disc repair i get the following error messages:

-invalid directory item count (it should be 49 instead of 48)
-invalid node structure
-volume check failed
error: filesystem verify or repair failed.

can someone advise on these messages? is format necessary or simple re-installation of OS will do it?

thank you.

Reinstalling the OS into an already corrupted filesystem is probably not going to help (and may even make things worse), unless the OS does a reformat as a normal part of the installation process. So in other words... yeah, I think you will want to reformat.

My memory may be a little fuzzy since I gave up on OS X at Lion (and haven't looked back), so interpret/update as necessary. You should first copy off as much of your files as you possibly can to another machine/drive, then boot into single-user mode to run disk utility to cleanup and repair as much as possible.

If that doesn't clean things up follow JBI's advice.

thanks guys. since mac is not my cup of tea my next question would be - what is the simplest way to delete my 2 existing partitions (user accounts?), format all and start from square one. i have os x leopard disc that came with the comp and os x snow leopard. when i tried snow disc hard drive was not visible at all. when i tried leopard disc was visible. i want to format it and then do a fresh, clean install of snow leopard. thanks for your help again.

I hesitate to contradict JBI, especially since I'm a Linux user rather than a MacOS user, but MacOS is supposed to be Unix-like, and if so, the error you report, "invalid directory count", is very minor. Just use the MacOS equivalent to f s c k ; see here or here.

Ha, f s c k is banned, even in URLs!

However, your system also reports "filesystem verify or repair failed". If this means that f s c k can't repair the error, I'd consider the possibility that the hard disk is physically defective. I'll let someone else suggest the MacOS equivalents to smartctl and badblocks.

also not that we have 2 user accounts on hd.

Yes, it sounds like the fs*k already failed. That's why I was suggesting a reformat.

It could probably be repaired manually by someone with sufficient knowledge of how the filesystem internals work, but since it sounds like the data is still recoverable a reformat is probably the best approach.

2x4 wrote:

hi
i have a little problem with my mac - i recently noticed slower speed, disk is constantly on. i did onyx cleanup and was advised to check start up volume. after performing disc repair i get the following error messages:

-invalid directory item count (it should be 49 instead of 48)
-invalid node structure
-volume check failed
error: filesystem verify or repair failed.

can someone advise on these messages? is format necessary or simple re-installation of OS will do it?

thank you.

I assume you have already ran Repair Disk in Disk Utility?

Deanjo wrote:

2x4 wrote:

hi
i have a little problem with my mac - i recently noticed slower speed, disk is constantly on. i did onyx cleanup and was advised to check start up volume. after performing disc repair i get the following error messages:

-invalid directory item count (it should be 49 instead of 48)
-invalid node structure
-volume check failed
error: filesystem verify or repair failed.

can someone advise on these messages? is format necessary or simple re-installation of OS will do it?

thank you.

I assume you have already ran Repair Disk in Disk Utility?

yes sir. i am actually in the middle of erasing/formatting my hd. after that i will proceed with snow leopard clean installation and will report back

I tried clean install of snow leopard but i get an error message:

install failed
mac os x could not be installed on your computer

the installer encounter an error that caused installation to fail

fked up hard drive or dvd?

also i did another disk repair from the utilities and i get the following error message:

UNUSED NODE IS NOT ERASED (NODE=2099)

UNUSED NODE IS NOT ERASED (NODE=20059)

INVALID NODE STRUCTURE

at this point im pretty sure that hard drive needs to be replaced. can you recommend me a good one about 1tb?

Sounds like something is corrupting the hard drive. Could be bad drive, bad cable, or bad RAM.

2x4 wrote:

at this point im pretty sure that hard drive needs to be replaced. can you recommend me a good one about 1tb?

What type of Mac? Pretty hard to recommend one if we don't even know if you need a 2.5 or 3.5 drive.

Yeah, although it's likely the drive is the problem here, you'll want to rule out bad memory before you make a potentially wasteful purchase. Give it a few hours (preferably overnight) running memtest just to make sure it's not actually a memory problem masking as something else.

so i took it to apple store, the guy did some diagnostics (the same this i did) and then later logged in again i guess i a safety mode/triage mode formated and repartitioned it again and looks like hd and memory are ok. i am reinstalling the system again now.