3 March 2009

The Mac wouldn't boot : invalid sibling link

Mac Fix for Harddrive failure

Firstly, I’m writing this in iWorks ’09 which is something different for me. I like the nice simple layout, and apparently Pages 09 supports Endnote X2 (or rather vice versa) which is why I’m trying it. And I apologise that this blog is every so slightly geeky. Slightly.

But the point of this blog is to detail the recovery of my Mac. I switched it on last night and it didn’t boot, did the spinning wheel thing, then shut itself down. Which wasn’t ideal !
I knew it wasn’t the harddrive as I could still bootcamp into Windows.

Had a chat to my Senior Mac support person, or #1 Mac Minion as I call him, and he made some suggestions, so here’s what I did.

Booted off the 10.5 DVD and ran the Disk Utility, and Repair HD. This resulted in:
Invalid node structure
Volume check failed
Error : Filesystem verify or repair failed

Mac Minion suggested I boot into single-user mode (switch on and press Apple + s) which ran through the text display and allowed me to run some commands:
ran /sbin/fsck
invalid sibling link (4,318)
/dev/rdisk0s2 (hfs) exited with signal 8
Booting into verbose mode (switch on and press Apple + v) went through the commands, then shutdown.

Googling the invalid sibling link resulted in the suggestion of booting from the DVD and running from terminal:
df (to find out what the drive name is for your Mac HD, mine was disk0s2)
umount /dev/disk0s2
fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk0s2 (which I ended up running twice to check it was ok as there were errors)
fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk0s2

and voila, I could boot again.

love, geek b

8 comments:

Pachyderm said...

So which one of us is the invalid sibling: J, or me?!

R

Anonymous said...

What if after these commands, he still says 'HD could not be repaired'?

Sphenodon said...

If the Mac is still able to recognise you have a drive, then try mounting it - either by pulling it out and using a usb adapter, or using firewire and the target boot - and drag your data off onto another mac.

In the end after all the mucking around with the drive, I ended up doing that anyway.
B

Anonymous said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Felipe said...

Thank you so much!! This post saved me a lot of time!!! Because of it I didnt had to back up and reinstall everything. Thanks a million!!!

aloska said...

Thanks! really helpful!!!

Anonymous said...

Diskwarrior saved my situation. Disk Utility sux!!!

Got the invalid sibling link, said my computer could not be repaired, it would either show the grey screen with the Apple logo and spinning thing, or just shut down before reaching that.

It wouldn't safe boot either, or Verbose boot didn't work either.

In Target mode connected to my friend's MacBook Pro, I ran Disk Utility's verify and it said my computer could not be fixed, and I should erase it. THANK GOD I got DiskWarrior. Fixed it in seconds and I was back to normal.

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