urgent help needed with disk error on imac

Hello

I'll be honest.. I am not really all that knowledgeable about the innards of my mac. I need assistance though.. I was able to research and understand enough to diagnose the problem but the threads/articles I am finding about fixing it are confusing me. I think i can do it if someone can give me straight forward, step by step instructions.

My imac belched when I was forced to do a hard reboot... grey screen. Happy mac sound but grey screen. Used pc to search google, etc.

efforts resulted in a flashing folder with ?

more google

boot disk plus all manner of holding down this or that key

result = got a screen!

disk utility running from cd can't fix the problem... says disk cannot be repaired

more google

did the key holding/PRAM thing... no improvement

error messages say invalid node structure... or... incorrect leaf record blah blah blah

SO... more google...

I tried the disk repair several times as one person on some forum or other had previously posted. No improvement.

The nearest I can understand is that my file catalogue is scrambled and the advice I gathered was to clone the drive and then reformat.

Ok... I now have a brand new 650BG drive....Exactly what do I do to make this work? I planned to reformat the new drive as mac-only... do i choose journalled or no..? and then what do I do to try to save my files?

Please... be kind and jargon-free... simplify as much as possible. I can worry about understanding the "why" parts later... right now I need a recipe to make this work.

can anyone help me out with this?

thanks so much

Well to start with to answer the format, you need to format it it Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
But to understand your problem further where exactly are you @ with it all ??
You still start it and you have the grey screen ?? or is it booting now ??

oh, sorry

I can boot from the install CD only. Without it I get grey screen or grey screen with flashing folder and ? mark.

I've run through the verify/repair disk options in disk utility from the CD... several times. I get the same thing - incorrect leaf record. It never finishes verifying.

I tried plugging my small external drives back in just for shites and giggles and they show up fine, verify fine.. all good with them. Funny thing though... the disk utility will not always list the mac hard drive as that name.. it sometimes just labels it by the size, and it seems to be actually getting that number from my smaller seagate drive and not the actual internal drive.

I want to know for sure that I can use the new larger drive to help fix this before I open it and format it. (Thanks for the info on that btw ) I am pretty much dirt poor and if the new drive won't help I have to return it. I know I need to back up, etc... but I can't spend the $100 right now unless it will fix things or save my data.

I do have quite a lot of stuff either burned to DVD's or on the external drives anyhow... but I'd still lose a lot as well.

So... yes, I can boot with the CD to run disk utility. Yes, I have a drive now.. but I don't know what to do after I format the drive.


thanks in advance

Time for a new hard drive, format and a clean OS install. Shame you had not backed up to an external using SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner before this trouble. Data saving is not cheap either, and DiskWarrior, which MAY repair the drive, cost as much as a new hard drive.

well i do have a lot of stuff still, on dvd's and the other externals...

are you saying then that i can't now clone? i was trying to follow some online articles about this kind of problem and it seemed like they were doing something to retrieve data *after* the leaf error.

anyone? Is it now too late to salvage anything? I will reformat and install new but if there is a way to save anything now i'd appreciate knowing.

thanks

Download a trial version of Data Recovery or similar, do a Google, and see if the material is recoverable prior to paying for the software.

http://macintosh-data-recovery.com/?gclid=COXB4Z-khKACFdAvpAodiBkRkQ

THANK YOU many times over!!

I'm going to give it a try... at this point I have nothing to lose really.

I'm downloading it onto my PC and then I will put it on the brand new external drive before I unzip it. They say they can recover data from a formatted drive if you haven't stored any new data on it.

here's hoping.

oh bloody ****...

Ok.. i want to shoot Stellar, my mac and then myself.

i partitioned the new HD and installed OSX on it. Downloaded the stellar recovery zip file and transferred it over to the new drive. Installed it.

i ran the program... without formatting the original HD and ALL MY CRAP IS THERE.... but Stellar won't let you recover anything without forking over more than $100.

it is SHOWING me my files.... all right there... so close... but i don't have another $100. i had to buy the HD and it was $100. i'm unemployed and ill, i cannot come up with another $100 anytime soon.

crappy

unless someone has another way of recovering those files that can happen for free... all i can do is run off my new drive until some day when i have the money to buy stellar.

thanks for all the help...