Macos – Unable to Repair Disk using Mac OS X Disk Utility

filesystemsmacmacosrepair

My wife has been complaining about her MacBook Air's performance. It seems to work fine, but when I ran Disk Utility and did a "Verify Disk", it reported filesystem errors. The "Repair Disk" button was disabled, because this is the startup drive.

So, I restarted with the Mac OS X Install Disc and ran Disk Utility again. When I run "Repair Disk", I get this output:

Verify and Repair volume "Macintosh HD"
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid node structure.
Volume check Failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

Is there anything else I can do to try to repair the filesystem (besides erase and reinstall)?

Update:

FWIW, here's what happened after I asked this question:

  1. Restarted in single-user mode (Command-S on boot). "/sbin/fsck -yf" gave more error messages. And when I did "exit", I saw error message "disk0s2: I/O error" followed by "CPU Halted".
  2. Tried to reboot. Apple logo appeared, and wheel spun for about 15-20 seconds, then machine turned off. This repeated every time I tried to reboot with the internal disk.
  3. Tried resetting PRAM (Command-Option-PR on startup). No change.
  4. Called Apple. The expert walked me through SMC reset, which did nothing. Tried to do an "Archive and Install" re-installation, to save original disk contents, but the Installer refused to install on that drive due to filesystem corruption.
  5. Did an erase and re-install. (And my wife now hates me.)

I'd still be interested to hear if there is anything more I should have done.

Best Answer

If you ever run into this problem again I highly recommend DiskWarrior - it's worth the price tag over and over. It's saved several systems for me from directory corruption.

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