I managed to figure out what the problem was- it didn't have anything to do with odd or even lengths. I had initially hardcoded my volume name length to 3 since I had initialized it as "NEW" and forgotten to update the record offsets at the end of the node while generalizing my code .... that was all:)

So I got an error -127on my iMac ..... whatever that may mean... btw does anyone know where to find a listing of all these errors? ... that would probably make things a whole lot easier - at least one would know where to search for the possible source of the error. I did a search on the web and on my iMac but came up with seemingly irrelevant stuff.