Back From The Dead

So my laptop completely bit the dust yesterday and DiskWarrior saved me.

I had several apps running at once when out of nowhere, the entire machine totally locked up. Couldn’t force quit. Couldn’t quit any app. So I had to do a hard restart (power + command + control).

The machine tried to restart but there was no startup chime.

It then moved on from a black screen to the typical gray with apple logo in the center and the spinning gear.

Then it shut down.

No login screen. Nothing.

I searched the web on my iPhone looking for another way in and found Single User Mode (command + s before the gray screen appears). This put me into unix command line mode where I am completely lost.

I found some basic fsck commands to try to find the error and it did: Invalid Sibling Link.

That basically means that parts of your directory are inaccessible. You can read about it here.

After learning more about this error, I downloaded DiskWarrior and ran it with my laptop in Target Disk Mode. The disk was repaired by DiskWarrior but had a final error message. It said that there wasn’t enough room to do the complete rewrite of the directory so I should remove some files. That was physically impossible since I couldn’t even boot the disk. So I told it to run anyway despite the message.

Once it finished it suggested I quit DiskWarrior and restart it. I did and my disk mounted on the desktop of the other machine. I ran DW one last time and it corrected some minor things and saved my drive.

So, is it worth it to buy DiskWarrior? Yes. Can it overcome a horrible disk error, in my case, it did.

I had so many applications installed on the laptop that wiping the disk that starting over was a real problem. I did have a backup and made another just now of my entire home directory.

PHEW!