So, I have pretty much been through hell and back yesterday, when I suddenly realised my harddrive (and startup disk) was failing.
Starting from the
Tiger disk, I started
Disk Utility in the hope it would fix it, but alas: It just told me the HD had reported a fatal hardware error and I should back up...
How exactly you back up from a disk that doesn't even mount is of course beyond me (I am sure there is a way - whatever...)
I did however get the error code, which was
-9972.
So, a few minutes on
Google, and I was in the picture:
After I installed Tiger, my machine went through spells of being very very slow and unresponsive, to the point of stalling completely. But most of the time a restart would sort out the problem and everything would go back to normal. Well, until yesterday. It appears, one of the features of Tiger is the ability to write faulty information into the B-Tree, thus messing up your HD's structure. OK, I am no expert on this, so I don't really know what it means, but it's an accumulative error, which means of course that it gets worse and worse over time and DIsk Utility is so useless, it doesn't actually do anything to prevent it.
OK, if this happens to you, take action immediately, as you are on the sure way to total data-loss.
The one thing that manages to repair this problem is the mighty
DISK WARRIOR.
Download it for $ 80, burn it on a CD and start from it. It took 15 mins and my drive was back to normal. Someone give these guys a medal please.
And Apple should seriously spend some of its cash on them too.
