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My first MacOS file system corruption
Nov. 8th, 2006 09:09 amI've been using Mac OS X for a good three years now (another Linux exile) and it's mostly been very reliable. Today I came across the first thing I couldn't fix: filesystem corruption.
It started yesterday when my iPod wouldn't sync up: iTunes would just sit there, spin its wheel, and churn the disk. Resetting the iPod didn't work, fs_usage showed the iTunes process not doing any reads during the churning, rebuilding the iTunes library didn't work, so I finally got wise to the problem and ran Disk First Aid.
My iTunes partition has a broken b-tree: "invalid sibling link". Disk First Aid cannot fix this. So now it's time to extract as much content as I can to a backup disk (this will do the same 1-minute churn for each file in a bad directory, but in 24+ hours it should get there), re-partition, then rebuild. I have all the original CDs (or FLAC files for bootlegs), so it'll just be a lot of work, but it sure is annoying to lose ratings and "last played" times on 8000 tracks.
If anyone knows of a good command-line way to fix this, I'm more than willing to try, as there's not a lot to lose at this point.
I'm surprised Disk First Aid isn't able to rebuild the directory tree from scratch, but then I'm used to Unix filesystems where the B-tree is an optimization that can always be reconstructed from the raw data.
It started yesterday when my iPod wouldn't sync up: iTunes would just sit there, spin its wheel, and churn the disk. Resetting the iPod didn't work, fs_usage showed the iTunes process not doing any reads during the churning, rebuilding the iTunes library didn't work, so I finally got wise to the problem and ran Disk First Aid.
My iTunes partition has a broken b-tree: "invalid sibling link". Disk First Aid cannot fix this. So now it's time to extract as much content as I can to a backup disk (this will do the same 1-minute churn for each file in a bad directory, but in 24+ hours it should get there), re-partition, then rebuild. I have all the original CDs (or FLAC files for bootlegs), so it'll just be a lot of work, but it sure is annoying to lose ratings and "last played" times on 8000 tracks.
If anyone knows of a good command-line way to fix this, I'm more than willing to try, as there's not a lot to lose at this point.
I'm surprised Disk First Aid isn't able to rebuild the directory tree from scratch, but then I'm used to Unix filesystems where the B-tree is an optimization that can always be reconstructed from the raw data.
