I booted in single user mode (command + S) and got a shell. I typed in the fsck command (fsck -fy) and it blithely told me that the hard disk could not be repaired. Reason: Keys were out of order. I could traverse the file directory, and my work was all there (/Volumes/Macintosh HD/ and then to the users directory and my name).
No problem, I shut down, and started the Disk Recovery Boot sector (restart while holding down command + R). I started the disk utilities, and was quite certain that disk utilities First Aid would fix it. I scanned the disk and sure enough, it told me that I needed to hit repair because the B-Tree was corrupt and keys were out of order. I eagerly hit the Repair Disk button and that was the beginning of several wasted hours. It couldn't fix the disk. The utility does let you download a n
What to do. I have an external hard drive, essentially doing nothing. So, what I was going to do, is just copy the files that I wanted to an external drive. Well, you can't mount external drives in single user mode.
I reformatted it with same Disk Utilities and did a raw copy by dragging the Macintosh HD dead disk into the source and dragging the newly formatted disk into the target. It copied. Great! - now I had copy of my work (and the entire Mac hard drive -- it was a bit external drive). The next step was open a terminal in the Disk Recovery Boot mode. My plan was to copy the files that I need from the external disk /Volumes/nameOfExternalDisk to another disk for my archives. The terminal could see and mount the other disk, but I couldn't mount the copy of the disk that I had just raw copied on the hard drive.
Well, I know how to force mount, so I did a df and the missing disk was /dev/disk2. After creating a mount point, I issued a mount, and Voila -- disk utilities now saw it as a mounted disk. Unfortunately the terminal in /Volumes/mountPoint didn't. I ran the repair disk a few million times, all to no avail.
Then I had the bright idea of blowing back the mounted external image on the mac hard drive. Maybe it would fix something. It didn't. However in single user mode, the data was all there. The disconcerting factor was that I had blown it back from a 3 TB external hard drive, and now Disk Utilities thought that there was three terabytes on my Mac hard drive. There isn't. Single User mode still lets me explore and look at my data from the terminal, but like a super autistic kid, the data won't come out.
Someone suggested Disk Warrior. They say it works magic. This was my first foray into Mac and initially I was very very pleased with the experience. I am totally soured on it now. My mistake was thinking that I wouldn't have to back up my dev on the Mac until I was finished. It was a new Mac, and they don't go kaput in the first few months. The real piss-off, is that the Mac engineers aren't as smart as the Disk Warrior guys, and that the inbred Mac Disk Utilities aren't as smart as Disk Warrior. If Steve Jobs were alive, I could taunt him and it would be fixed. Now I just rant in my blog.
