Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!

Subject: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,M.Ted
Date: 26 May 05 - 11:32 PM

I use a Mac G3 with OS 8.6 (because I run a lot of older apps)--I use iCab on the web, because it runs more quickly and smoothly than anything else--so yesterday, I clicked on a link, a blank page came up, and the screen froze(I think it was on the Excite homepage)--I restarted, the Mac face came up, then the screen flicked and flashed and went dark--on restart, the dreaded question mark came up--

I rebooted from the Techtools Pro disk, but was unable to rebuild the directory--the Mac disk utility told me that there was an invalid B-Tree PEOF and that it was impossible to fix--I looked it up and bought Disk Warrior, which built a new directory--when I finally got the hard drive back, about 2 of the 4 gigs of stuff I had on it were gone--the odd thing was that almost every application had been zapped, as well as the operating system--

I do back-up, and I keep installers for most of the software archived (though some of my older programs require keys(an of course, they are the ones that are no longer supported by anyone)--so the losses can be mostly recouped--I am still trying to figure out what happened--any thoughts from the technically inclined?

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 26 May 05 - 11:55 PM

Any thoughts? What a horror story!

My thought is that no matter how many techies you talk to, if they tell you to format the hard drive, spit in their eye. That's usually the answer of the techie who has run out of his/her limited answers. Once you format the hard drive, there is little chance of retreival or repair (beyond some of the heroic measures that are possible but at a price).

Good luck.

SRS

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,MTed
Date: 27 May 05 - 12:08 AM

No reformatting--I rebuilt the directory and restored the hard drive--only thing is, it is about half the size it was yesterday.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 27 May 05 - 06:11 AM

I've been working for the last week on a friend's PC running Windows XP, which displayed exactly the same symptoms.

Unfortunately for her, the only course is file retrieval at about £200.

I think we might be looking at a new virus that wallops the file allocation tables, and the only way back is repartition and format C.

Her AVG antivirus was set on manual update, and she hadn't updated for two months. Was yours up to date?

Don T.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,M.Ted
Date: 27 May 05 - 10:53 AM

Mine was up to date, which is not saying much, because there is so little virus activity on Macs--while researching this, I came across some commentary that indicated that severe damage can occur after certain types of browser related crashes--unfortunately, I was unable to save the link--the thing that is peculiar is that there seems to be a flap of this kind of trouble just now--if it is not a virus(and it would have to be a cross platform virus) I am hardpressed to figure why it would suddenly be a problem--

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 27 May 05 - 01:08 PM

M Ted -

This sounds somewhat like what I saw recently when a hard drive failed. The initial symptom in my case was a drive that said that everything was there - the Directories were still intact - but attempts to open files got nothing but trash. When I attempted to move stuff (to other drives), the directories crumbled and files just sort of "disappeared" as I tried to move them.

Mine was an external drive, with nothing but data, so after I recovered what I could I did reformat it. The reformat looked normal, and files would indicate good copies to it, but large numbers of them couldn't be copied back from it in useful form.

Since most "modern" OS will attempt to put frequently accessed files at disk center where they're most quickly accessed, if the disk media starts to crumble it's common for files of "similar kind" to go first - and together.

Drive manufacturers frequently have some fairly good diagnostic programs at their sites, so you may be able to get one that will give you a "bill of health" for your drive. Whether the results are helpful depends somewhat on which manufacturer you're dealing with. You may also have some disk diagnostic tools on your Mac, but I don't know much about what's there.

There have been slightly increasing numbers of viral exploits against Mac, but I haven't seen anything of this sort reported recently. If there were any widespread incidence of such attacks they would probably have been conspicuously announced. Of course you may just be the "lucky one" who got the first case of something...

If you are seeing a pending or developing drive failure, the same - or some other - files probably will disappear again, sooner or later. Loss of the directory would imply that the failure was localized on a fairly critical part of the disk, perhaps, although it doesn't mean it's at the "root" location where the directory is. Unfortunately it can be very difficult to really tell what's going on, or to predict how bad it's going to get.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 27 May 05 - 03:05 PM

I read you John, and you are certainly right about failing HDDs, but the one I've been working on is Seagate 160Gb, less that two years old, on a lightly used home PC. I'll check into what Seagate have in the way of diagnostic tools tho'. Can't hurt! Might help!

Don T.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: mack/misophist
Date: 27 May 05 - 03:39 PM

If I'm not mistaken, the 'corrupt b-tree' message means that your 'file table' became corrupt. ie. The index that told the system where to look for files was no longer correct. The files were probably still there, but unless the system knows where to look.....

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: robomatic
Date: 27 May 05 - 04:03 PM

I've had several problems of this sort. In three cases they were hard drive failures. Another case I loaned out a hard drive to someone who's system did something nasty to the file allocation table, such as telling it the drive was a different format! This was totally saved by using a Linux (Knoppix) system-on-a-CD which restored the correct setting to the table. This worked slick.

I had a trickier problem which is similar to the ones mentioned here: I was running windows XP Pro on a 160 GB single partitian hard drive. Something blipped in XP and it wouldn't boot. I used the XP Pro CD install to get it running again but of the 20 GB of music material that was there, I can only see about 4. When I look at the Properties window, it tells me that 20 GB of the drive is utilized, but the file system can only ever see the 4 GB plus the operating system. I think when I reinstalled XP Pro I did something to zap the file allocation table or the directory, but I'm convinced I should be able to recover the unseen 16 GB of music. I'm trying to learn linux enough to do this, but in the meantime I have a large Hard Drive I can't write on.

I've had some other problems which are more PC related and not worth going in to here. But I've learned not to play favorites. Windows, Mac, Linux, each have their strengths and weaknesses. Never trust a single copy of anything, and have a 'system' of backing up. There is NO single panacea.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 27 May 05 - 04:17 PM

The HD I mentioned above was still under 1 year warranty (and was replaced by the mfr, no argument).

A second similar one (a little smaller) went 15 months - on a 1 year warranty. It was easy to diagnose, since it just didn't spin anymore.

HD makers quote MTBF (mean time before failure) in the range of about 10,000 to 20,000 hours for cheaper (standard commercial) drives, up to 80,000 to 120,000 for "high reliability" ones. The "means" don't mean a lot though in any individual case.

The main difference between the high reliability ones and the cheap ones seems to be that they run the expensive ones for a few hours to eliminate the ones that will die early. It raises the "mean," since there are fewer early failures to pull the averages down; but it doesn't really affect the failure distribution expected for individual drives - for the ones that make it past the "early failure" period. HD failures seem to be a clump in "first year," a cluster at "2-3 years," and a fairly large bunch of "never." (The "never" sort of depends on the computer not lasting more than 10 or 12 years though.)

For estimating purposes, "24-7" operation for a year is about 9,000 hours, and a 20,000 hour MTBF means (sort of) that a "more than half" of users should have no HD failures in a year of 24-7 use. 8 hour shifts 5 days a week, makes a standard man-year about 2,088 hours (most US company schedules). You can manipulate the statistics to suggest that more than half of users will get at least 5 years without a failure in single shift "workday" use.

None of this means much if you're in the other half of the users.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 27 May 05 - 04:40 PM

robomatic -

You may have a problem with the HD format options on your WinXP machine. WinXP can read FAT32 volumes up to a couple of TB, but by design they limited the partition size that it can create and/or format, in FAT formats, to something pretty small. I think I recall something like 30 GB(?). If you've moved FAT16 or FAT32 format partitions around, you may have run into problems in properly defining and setting them up because of this limitation.

Lots of 160 GB and larger hard drives come preformatted as single partition FAT32 drives, and work ok in WinXP, but if you try to repartition them you have to observe significantly lower WinXP limits on partition size - or use a DOS boot from a Win98 instl to do the partitioning and formats (a MickeySoft suggested work-around, in fact). They apparently assumed that anyone using partitions larger than 20 or 30 GB would use NTFS format like they recommend.

There are several "data recovery programs" that claim good results getting stuff back from "lost format" drives, but I don't know of a free one. Several give you a free trial download, that will tell you if it found something; but you have to save the "analysis result" and send them money to unlock the "save the files" ability. (I've seen very good reports on these programs from camera chip users, as these seem to lose format fairly easily; but on large hard drives they can take hours, or days, for a full scan, so plan on a long session if you try one.)

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: robomatic
Date: 27 May 05 - 05:30 PM

JohnInKansas:

Thank you for both your posts: Re: The first post, my first failure was a high priced IBM (Hitachi) drive and it failed over time so I was able to pull anything I had not yet saved off of it. I was told IBM (Hitachi) drives are typically held in high regard.

Both other hard drive failures have been Maxtors, and for the time being I don't buy that brand, although the company made no problems about replacing them after their own software judged the drives at fault.

I believe in using the hell out of one's computer equipment. By this I mean no less than turn them on and use them and don't turn them off for the first four weeks of use. It's called 'burn-in'. I had a Samsung Monitor fail after two hours of use. CompUSA wouldnt let me change brands and they had one leftover Samsung in a battered box but it turned out to work well for years.

As to FAT32 vs other formats, XP is limited to formatting FAT partitions to 32 GB or less. But there is no technical reason to limit it this way as far as I know. I noticed that my most excellent ACOM external 250 GB unit which has yet to give me any trouble whatsoever after a lot of use, incorporates a standard Western Digital drive formatted as one large FAT32.

Caution: Win XP (whether Home or Pro) does not handle single partitions of more than 133 GB unless you have upgraded to SP1.

Anyhow, I have taken to formatting my large drives to FAT32 single partition by using Linux to format to 'FAT32 Win95' which I believe allows long file names. All 3 of my machines seem to see everything on these large drives: the Win2K, the WinXP, and the Linux.

Back to my problem drive. It ran and functioned just fine on XP Pro, and at the time I knew less about formatting so it was formatted by Win XP to be NTSC one large partition. The system suddenly wouldn't boot and gave me an error message like "Can't find the NTLDR" I pulled what I thought was the proper bit of file from another machine but all I got was a different error message. It was all some time ago. Anyhow, as I stated above, I re-installed WinXP Pro hoping that install would simply fix the existing WinXP Pro but it didn't, it required a total reinstall, and after I was back up and on-line, I discovered that about half my music folders had disappeared, but, oddly, not all of them. It was like having a subset there of what I remembered.

At that time I didn't mess around with file formats, but as hard drives have been getting cheaper I have held off adding any info to the problem drive I just need to learn to know linux better and then I'll go through it with a fine toothed comb.

Sorry to run on so long.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 27 May 05 - 06:08 PM

robomatic -

By the time I got around to WinXP, SP-1 was pretty much standards, so I haven't looked at anything before that. There may be limitations for some earlier versions, but the only one I've found for WinXP SP1 is reads 2 TB or more, essentially the address limit for 32 bit addys and 2 KB clusters, I think.

The Microsoft Knowledge Base does include at least one reference that suggests that you can use Win98 to format larger FAT32 drives. You do need Win98SE, I believe; but there shouldn't be much around old enough not to have what it added. I believe (don't trust my memory on this) that WinME also could work some larger partitions, although the limits may be a little different. That would be expected since it's just a kludged-up Win98.

Since the only real reason to keep large FAT16 or FAT32 drives around is for compatibility with xNIX and/or older Windows, it would seem like any FAT format one of them makes should be okay with WinXP. Microsoft may have limited the WinXP format size just to encourage people to use NTFS (or discourage them from using FAT), although they don't give any rationale in what I've seen.

Aside from the format/partition question, there is a known limit on the maximum total size you can copy and paste reliably in Win Explorer. I don't recall what the numbers were, and have never hit up against it; but attempting to copy a full large drive to someplace else in a singe pass could conceivable drop some files. There may also be a limit on number of files in a single pass, but if there is it's huge. At the time I encountered the note on the Win Explorer limits, I didn't think I'd ever see a drive that big - I believe it is a "server size" number.

John

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,Fullerton
Date: 27 May 05 - 06:40 PM

Have you tried starting up without extensions? (hold the space bar while you press start)

Disk first aid is usualy the best thing for fixing these things. Norton seems s little bit too picky.

Have you tried your software restore disks?

I have a mac.

Similar thing happened to me on christmas eve.

when i phoned my supplier he said --- "youve got the death star problem!!" I took his advice

My drive was a xxxxstar drive i dont remember the exact name

I fitted a new drive, and left the old one in place, put the new OS on there and MUCH to my relief I was able to retreive my data. PHEW!

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST
Date: 27 May 05 - 06:42 PM

P.S. When this first happened to me all the files seemed to disappear.............

VERY SCARY!!!!

hope you sort it out

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: Don(Wyziwyg)T
Date: 27 May 05 - 08:44 PM

The copying limit that I ran up against, in trying a disk copy to a new HDD, was a limit of 8 levels of subdirectories. This was with win98SE. It surprised me at the time, but on checking I found places where subdirs went on down 10 or 12 levels, and nothing below 8 was copied.

Don't know whether the same applies with XP or Mac tho'.

Don T.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: mack/misophist
Date: 27 May 05 - 09:45 PM

Robomatic:

In cases where the Knoppix cd won't help, I don't think there's anything else in linux that can help much with windows hard drive issues. Other than the reiser file system, which is wonderful. AND it makes multiple copies of the inode table at widely separated intervals.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: M.Ted
Date: 27 May 05 - 09:57 PM

It was impossible to start without the extensions, because the extensions, and the entire operating system were obliterated. Disk First Aid told me I had to reformat--the file recovery programs told me there were no files to recover.

The idea that the subdirectory level had something to do with what was zapped seems to make sense, but I don'tknow enough about how things are stored to make any sense of it--

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: The Fooles Troupe
Date: 28 May 05 - 01:12 AM

One old piece of advice from one old techie type person... not a Mac expert, but the advice mostly still holds.

If you have a suspected flaky disk, NEVER add a 'fix it tool' (or ANY new disk writes) to that drive - you may trash info by overwrioting things, dir entries especially. If you have only one physical disk, you are in trouble, unless you already have the tool loaded - but of course it may be corrupted too............

If you have 2 or more disks, even installing the tool is still risky. If the flaky disk has an OS (any) on it, then the OS will probably write some info concerning (maybe even just links to) the newly installed appln, still trashing direstory entries on the flaky disk.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: robomatic
Date: 28 May 05 - 01:23 AM

I should have added that ever since my first major disk problem, I either have 2 disks with my system on one and my most important data on the other (system-less) disk, or if I run with a single disk, the operating system and all programs have a partition to themselves.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,Fullerton
Date: 28 May 05 - 01:53 AM

"Disk First Aid told me I had to reformat--the file recovery programs told me there were no files to recover."


I got the same message when my HD crashed. Still managed to recover ALL files though. By using the method I described earlier.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,MTed
Date: 29 May 05 - 02:34 PM

Fullerton--I know what you're saying, I was just explaining that Disk First Aid wouldn't work for me--Techtool didn't work either, the repair and recover buttons would'nt come up

I had to resort to Disc Warrior in order to buid a new directory in order to find the hard drive again-Now that I've got it back, I can go in with other programs and recover everything(or just about everything)--I haven't explained the whole tedious process that I went through--though I had to do what you did, which was to go in from another drive-

I am curious to know what kind of drive you put in-I am thinking about getting the PCI card and installing a Serial ATA drive--

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,Fullerton
Date: 29 May 05 - 06:54 PM

I'll check for you tomorrow (monday AM GMT) if you dont mind MTed I've got baaaad back today and i need to turn my Mac round to open it up.
( i just spent 20 mins trying to figure out a way of finding the name and brand etc via system profiler - it didnt tell me anything)

hope you sort it soon

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,MTed
Date: 29 May 05 - 08:58 PM

When you pull down the System Profiler, then pull down "Devices and Volumes", then it will give you a little tree with each device--mine reads "Internal ATA 1 Hard Drive (name of the volume)" there is a little triangle between ATA 1 and Hard Drive, and when you click on it, it will display all the info on the device, including Mfg, serial no. etc--

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,Fullerton
Date: 30 May 05 - 10:54 AM

LOL ! I just did exactly that!

( iTried it in OSX yesterday with no good answer.

OS9 tells me its a Seagate 140 Gb.

Sorry the infos late.

I got mine from Studiocare. It's a Seagate 140Mb.

IF you got it from them you can be assured of patient real advice on the matter. They are not a helpline. But they are far better than one - if you're a customer.

Subject: RE: Tech: Freeze! Flash! OS and apps gone!
From: GUEST,MTed
Date: 30 May 05 - 08:57 PM

Seagate drives are also supposed to be nearly silent, which is a big help--they also have the new serial drives, so, armed with your recommendation, I'll check them out--