G-Tech External HD "Invalid B-tree node size," won't mount -- HELP!

Hello,

I purchased a G-Tech Q 500GB External Hard drive about a month ago. There have been numerous issues with it since I got it a month ago.

I had it set as my primary iTunes hard drive (where I stored all of my 20,000+ songs, videos, and more). When I would "move to trash" files in iTunes, I would not be able to empty the trash and I would get an "Error -50" message in finder. If I turn off the drive, the files would dissapear out of the trash. The other day, the same thing happened, and I immediately restarted my computer; my drive doesn't isn't even recognized anymore, except in Disk Utility where it comes up as "disk2s2," and when I click verify or repair, I get this message:

Verify and Repair volume “disk2s2”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid B-tree node size
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

The main issue now is getting it to mount; I don't necessarily want to spend $100 on a piece of software, but I did run demos of a couple different disk repair programs; here are the results:

mac osx disk utility -- drive appears in left pane as "465.8 GB G-TECH, disk2s2" -- when I try to verify/repair, I get the aforementioned error message.
drive genius -- disk not coming up in any of the options, except for "repartition"
diskwarrior (booted on classic on old eMac) - disk did come up, but couldn't graph or repair (buttons were disabled)

Please help me!

That error seems to indicate (at least from what I've been able to find using Google) that the disk directory is damaged.

Several folks who had that error stated they fixed it with Disk Warrior. However, from your post, it appears that Disk Warrior either can not repair the drive or maybe it's because you ran it from an old eMac?

What you might try - in order to recover your data, is hook up your machine to another Mac and use Target mode (firewire to firewire) to try and copy, if possible, the data from the G-Tech. If you can copy all your data successfully, you can then RMA the drive since it's probably still under warranty.

Regards.

chscag said:

That error seems to indicate (at least from what I've been able to find using Google) that the disk directory is damaged.

Several folks who had that error stated they fixed it with Disk Warrior. However, from your post, it appears that Disk Warrior either can not repair the drive or maybe it's because you ran it from an old eMac?

What you might try - in order to recover your data, is hook up your machine to another Mac and use Target mode (firewire to firewire) to try and copy, if possible, the data from the G-Tech. If you can copy all your data successfully, you can then RMA the drive since it's probably still under warranty.

Regards.

Click to expand...

Thank you for the quick response! Could you elaborate on target mode? Because it's not my actual Macbook pro that's having the problem, it's the G-Tech. Are you basically suggesting that I daisy chain the G-tech to my mbp, and then my mac to another computer, and try to target both? The G-tech would most likely not mount.

Yes, that's what I meant. It's worth a try since there's a chance the target host Mac will be able to "see" the "G-tech". Otherwise, your only hope of saving your data off the drive may be to send it to a specialist. And that's very expensive.

And there's the possibility that if you can hook the drive to another Mac (preferably a newer machine) Disk Warrior may work.

Regards.