Friend’s iMac Core Duo crashed and rebooted with “blinking folder.” On running Disk Utility, received following ominous message:
Invalid Volume Header
–Checking HFS Plus volume
–Checking Extents Overflow file
–Checking Catalog file
Invalid sibling link
Volume check failed
ERROR: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
Not being a Mac expert, figured I’d check in here if anyone was familiar. Is friend’s hard drive fragged? Whole computer fragged? Any way to recover data? Thanks in advance for any tips.
Macs sadly have a tendency to have their hardware just crap out. We are all Mac here and have been for 20 years and we always get 3 years of Apple Care. Our new mac mini already lost it’s mobo- it was 2 months old. A new iMac, also 2 months old just got new ram installed-
Yeah we all rave over Macs but hardware wise, especially first generation, they suck.
I bet he needs a new hard drive…hopefully it is still under warranty? (btw, Apple Care is really stupendous- our guy down the street just runs his tests, then finds what part is wrong and I usually have it replaced and back in the office in 2 days)
It might be a corrupted disk. There is a product by Alsoft called Disk Warrior that can sometimes fix problems that Disk Utility can’t. But generally speaking I’d suspect based on the description that your friend had a catastrophic hardware failure. Even if your friend manages to get this up and running again, he or she should probably be budgeting for a new hard drive and/or a backup solution, because this crash might be a leading indicator of future problems.
Good luck.
peterb
PS: Hanzii, way to be completely unhelpful.
My super expensive Mac Pro was crashing constantly. I think it was the Crucial RAM I put in there to augment the 2 gigs it shipped with. (Apparently bad RAM is a common cause of crashing.) Since I’ve removed the extra RAM, crashes seem less frequent (knock on wood). Price for 2 gigs of Apple-approved RAM from the Apple store: $500!
Mac’s don’t crash, my foot. I begged at times for the stability of my Vista box.
This info doesn’t seem particularly pertinent to the OP’s situation… just chiming in on the whole Mac-crashing thing. (And I’m not a Mac hater. I think they’re pretty cool machines, albeit outrageously expensive.)
I don’t think you’ll find any Mac advocate who will state that a Mac will not crash with faulty hardware installed in it (bad hard drive, bad ram, etc). That would be ludicrous.
Take it to the Apple Store, and they’ll take it for a couple of weeks and then fix it for you. At least, that’s how my wife’s MacBook has worked the two times it died on her.
You’re right.
If you look around in the Hardware forum you’ll see that I usually offer help when I can. But allthough I own a Mac I don’t know how to do anything under the hood on it, so I had nothing of value to add.
… but I was tired of all the smug Mac-owners adding nothing but their feelings of superiority to every Vista/Windows 7-thread recently, so this was for them.
The blinking folder icon means that it can’t find the startup files. When that happens the disk has become corrupted (either in software or hardware). Try a disk utility like diskwarrior and see if the disk is even visible to the tool. if it is and it spins up then the tool can probably repair it. If it isn’t visible then it’s time to check the physical drive to see if it is dead.
A dead drive can be replaced by Apple if under warranty or by you cheaply enough if not. Hopefully your friend has a backup since drives fail regardless of hardware & OS type.
I assume you’re running Disk Utility from the boot DVD, no?
Next thing you wanna do is try the “Repair” option if it’s available. Disk Utility should tell you what to do next. If that fails, it’s probably busted; take it to your nearby Apple store (if available) or call 1-800-APL-CARE and they’ll tell you what to do next.
If the hard drive is just having errors in the boot sector they have a magic trick where they use the firewire port to turn your old computer’s HDD into an external HDD and should be able to magically transfer the data into a new computer (if that’s what’s required).
Unfortunately, if this is out of warranty, these services will cost money.
Don’t be stupid. (That’s my job.) My white iBook G3 died so many times that it triggered a lemon clause in the extended warranty (which paid for itself several times over) – leading to my ownership of a brand-new iBook G4. What kept me coming back was that I was always treated nicely, the repairs came back quickly (and worked), and … hey, free upgrade.
Apple’s not any different from any other hardware manufacturer in terms of reliability; sometimes they’re more reliable, sometimes less so. The difference is that their customer service when things DO go wrong is usually ranked among the top by e.g. Consumer Reports, and by a hefty margin.
Yeah, I’ll give you that. I read a recent PC World where they had asked 40.000 readers about customer service and Apple was tops - surprisingly (not because I hadn’t heard it before, but because of their size and generally good hardware) HP was rock bottom in almost every lidt.
Unfortunately I don’t think It’s the case here. Well, HP service is still crap, but Apple is too because service is outsourced to a local company and things you guys pay extra for is covered by the warranty companies have to offer by law here. Something it seems Apple feels above - at least there’s been several cases of them trying to weasel around mandatory warranties.
Oh geez, only once? I had it happen a lot in the mid-late 90’s when I was building my own machines most of the time. Haven’t had it happen since then, though.
Disk Utility can hide information. I recommend booting into single-user mode (cmd-s) and running the fsck command it recommends there. But it looks like a dead drive. Changing the drive is tedious, so make sure the replacement is a good, huge one.
Had it for a year and a half now, and it’s still workin’ dandy. Much better than that iBook ever did. On the other hand, I’m also not carrying it with me to hell and back every day.
