Macos – OSX Mavericks – Recovering from an Invalid Record Count error

boothard drivemacososx-maverickspartitioning

I've ended up with a friend's Macbook Pro that won't boot. They've given it to me asking me to fix as they have family photos not backed up (naughty, I know!) they want retrieved.

When booting up, only the recovery partition is visible when pressing Option at start up. After booting off a USB Rescue disk, in Disk Utility, the disk is visible, but greyed out.

enter image description here

When I use the Disk Utility to repair the disk, it says it's not repairable due to an invalid record count.

Invalid record count

I found this thread that suggested running the following command from a terminal session (still in the USB Rescue Disk boot):

/sbin/fsck_hfs -yprd /dev/disk0s2

Which produces the following output:

-bash-3.2# /sbin/fsck_hfs -yprd /dev/disk0s2
/dev/rdisk0s2: starting
journal_replay(/dev/disk0s2) returned 22
        Using cacheBlockSize=32K cacheTotalBlock=16384 cacheSize=524288K
   Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-226.1.1).
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
hfs_swap_BTNode: invalid forward link (0x88B3FF4E)
hfs_swap_BTNode: invalid backward link (0xD4023F69)
hfs_swap_BTNode: invalid node kind (-16)
hfs_swap_BTNode: invalid node height (96)
hfs_swap_BTNode: invalid record count (0xFBFE)
   Invalid record count
(3, 3)
** The volume   could not be verified completely.
        volume check failed with error 2
        volume type is pure HFS+
        primary MDB is at block 0 0x00
        alternate MDB is at block 0 0x00
        primary VHB is at block 2 0x02
        alternate VHB is at block 975093950 0x3a1ec0be
        sector size = 512 0x200
        VolumeObject flags = 0x07
        total sectors for volume 975093952 0x3a1ec0c0
        total sectors for embedded volume = 0 0x00
        CheckHFS returned -1317, fsmodified = 0
-bash-3.2#

I did try it from Single user mode and it displayed random ascii characters saying journal not found, waiting 10 seconds several times before displaying the same information above.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might be able to repair the OSX partition and, or at the very least, save the data/photos?

Best Answer

Had the same situation today. My MacBook Pro disk died and was showing the "invalid record count" error. I wasn't able to boot, to mount the disk and copy any data out of it.

As much as I didn't enjoy shelling 100$+ on the commercial software the DiskWarrior fixed my problem and I recovered my data. Highly recommended!

The steps:

  • When you install the DiskWarrior it asks you where do you want it to be installed, choose USB as a target
  • Press "Alt" during booting, choose recover option
  • Go to terminal, run the DiskWarrior from /Volumes/yourusbpath
  • It will open the new window, which will allow to repair the disk
Related Question