03-25-2008, 07:31 PM

Ok, here goes... I'm a 50+ year old who has been into computers for 7 years. I've done pretty well making my living off the internet, but I'm definitely no Mac Genius when it comes to diagnosing, programming, etc. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to all that ...but I can follow concise instructions pretty well

Anyway, I went to install Boot camp today on my Macbook Pro since Parallels has been a useless mess for me. So, I figured I'd do a Verify Disk and permission repair before I started the partition process.
So, I tried permission repair and then verify disk ...but it is frozen up and wouldn't complete the tasks, so I popped in my Leopard install disk and start up holding C, then went to Disk Utility. I clicked on Repair Disk and a little while later it says "Disk Utility Stopped Repairing" and "Invalid Sibling Link". So, I quit Disk Utility and tried to restart using my hard drive. The grey screen appeared with the apple, ...the circle was spinning, but after 5 minutes of trying to start up the machine shuts down. So, after a couple more tries I went back and started it back up holding C and went back to Disk Utility (since I didn't have the knowledge for what else to try). Now the verify and repair buttons are greyed out and it won't even give me the option to repair or verify my HD. I have tried 15 times to restart using my HD but no luck.
BTW, this computer has been acting up by freezing and having apps continually crash since I installed Leopard. I do have my computer backed up with Time machine onto a 500gb drive, so that's the good part I suppose. Another question... Does Time machine backup all the users on the computer or will those users lose photos if I do a clean install and then use Time Machine to restore my files?
So anyway, back to the machine. I did a search on the internet with another laptop for "Invalid Sibling Link" and found some varied 'fixes', but since I'm a little nervous about typing "fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk0s2" in the terminal box like one poster suggested I thought I'd ask here what to do.
Should I just wipe it clean?

03-25-2008, 09:27 PM

I did some more looking online and found this: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...70204093925888

I tried some of these tips but no luck. I know I could probably buy DiskWarrior ($99) and fix this but since I have the system backed up on an external drive with Time Machine it may be easier just to wipe it clean and start over...?

Does anyone know if Time Machine backs up everything exactly like before, or will I have to reinstall my apps like my Adobe Creative Suite with the original disks? (My wife tossed the original cd's while cleaning.)

03-25-2008, 09:55 PM

Thanks but never mind.
I went ahead and erased it all and reinstalled since I couldn't find any answers.