MacOS – Can’t mount Macintosh HD volume – journal issue

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My MacBook Pro (Mavericks) keeps booting into OS X Startup Utility. Disk Utility shows Macintosh HD volume as unavailable – not mounted.

Running fsck_hfs -l /dev/disk0s2 returns:

** /dev/rdisk0s2 (NO WRITE)
   Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-226.1.1).
   Invalid content in journal.
** Performing live verification.
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
   Invalid record count
(3, 3)
** The volume   could not be verified completely.

It looks like OSX can't mount the volume due to collapsed journal. However, I've tried turning journaling off (on the raw device), then mounting, with no success.

All happened out of the blue, no mechanical damage (fall, etc.).

Best Answer

You should be able to remove the journal on the disk with:

/System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util -N /dev/disk0s2

Once you can mount the volume again, you can try re-enabling journaling via Disk Utils or the command line:

/System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/hfs.util -J /Volumes/VOLUME_NAME

Note that this second command differs in that you specify the volume name as you would see in Finder.

For more information, see man hfs.util.

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