Re: Repair disk without Tiger DVD?

In article <1186656270.204290.4770@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Suds <Surain.Rajadurai@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm from Melbourne, Australia and am currently in Holland on a
research posting, I won't be home for another 2 months. I've noticed
my Macbook running a little slowly recently and decided to verify the
disk, it seems it needs some minor repair. The only problem is that I
didn't bring my Tiger DVD with me (yes I know, I'm stupid!).

Boot into Single User Mode (Hold just the s key, or Cmd-s, I forget).
You'll get into a 'terminal-like' environment. 2 or 3 lines above the
prompt, you'll see it tell you about "/sbin/fsck -fy" to repair the
disk. To be clear: type that, without the quotes, and hit Enter. It I
made a typo above, type what your machine tells you, not what I told you.

It'll go through some disk tests and if it runs into trouble it thinks
it can fix will try to do so and repoirt if it thinks it managed to fix
them or not.

In my opinion, if it does report problems and claims to have fixed
them, it is wise to run it again (just enter the same command again).
Because problem could be lurking behind the fixed ones. (Nothing to do
with fsck in particular. Not general thing with all file system repair
apps.)

When done, type "shutdown -r now" (without quotes) and hit Enter, to
restart. Let it restart normally -- don't hold any keys.

In Single User Mode you are not protected from your mistakes, so unless
you know what you're doing (you don't, or else you wouldn't have asked
;)), do not make any typos, let alone try to do anything else.


Alternatively, just walk into a Mac shop and explain the problem.
They'll have a Tiger disk to boot from and run Disk Utility right there
and then. At the very worst they'd charge you for that. If it's just a
single run, easily fixed, I'd expect it to be free -- if you are nice :)

If you have no idea where to find a Mac shop nearby, you could ask in
<news:nl.comp.sys.mac> or just google a bit.

Is there any way to repair the disk without having my disks couriered
all the way from Australia? I have a portable hard drive with me that
is several times larger than my current hard drive - i use it to
backup on a weekly basis - could that be used to clone and then boot
in target disk mode?

If it has enough free space, and is connected with FireWire, yes. If
it's USB-only: probably (some but not all combinations of Macs, USB
drives and Mac OS X are bootable). You'd need to clone a running system
though. I believe SuperDuper can do that. Make sure to not overwrite the
other data on that back-up disk though.

However, you'd be cloning a damaged volume, so that in itself might
preve nt sucxcesful cloning.

--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>

Mac user: "Macs only have 40 viruses, tops!"
PC user: "SEE! Not even the virus writers support Macs!"
.

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