I am a new subscriber to the list, so I am blindly hoping this kind of post is appropriate.

(There are five paragraphs of background before I get to the heart of my question.)

I had an IDE drive in a Mac 6500/300 that went bad the other day. It was odd (in my limited experience with drives going bad) that I heard some sort of noise, a click, come out of the machine just as things went south.

It took a while to even get the Mac to run at all--I kept getting the flashing ? disk upon booting. Finally, with Norton Utilities and Command-Option PR, we were able to get the machine running again, but Norton Utilities said it couldn't fix my problem.

So, I backed everything that I could get to up to tape (rather than having to restore from an old image and 30 or more incrementals), and I put in a new hard drive. I was holding out on trying to reformat the old one until I could see what was wrong with it (i.e., what had become unavailable). Plus, I was hoping that I wouldn't even have to use the tape, that I could just mount a new drive along with the old drive in my Mac and do a disk-to-disk copy.

Unfortunately the 6500s have fairly constrained cases and connectors, and it didn't seem likely that I could just pop in a second hard drive. So, I went with starting from scratch and restoring from tape.

Once I got my Mac all back together, I thought it would be fun to see what all this hfs on Linux stuff was about, and I am really, really impressed. Combined with netatalk (or alone), it's just beautiful to be able to mount something as odd (to my mind) as an HFS IDE drive. It's incredible to be able to do something for a Mac on an x86 box that I couldn't figure out how to do on a Mac.

Now that you have the story, here is where my questions begin. First, when I run du on the HFS device, I get the following errors:

du: /mac/Archive/dianthus-tars: No such file or directory du: /mac/CodeWarrior Lite/Metrowerks CodeWarrior/MacOS Support/Libraries/Pascal/68K: No such file or directory du: /mac/CodeWarrior Lite/Metrowerks CodeWarrior/MacOS Support/Libraries/Runtime/Runtime 68K: No such file or directory du: /mac/Documents/Spring Rg Data/mixed up data/s007: No such file or directory du: /mac/Documents/Spring Rg Data/s009: No such file or directory du: /mac/Documents/Spring Rg Data/s013: No such file or directory du: /mac/local/MCL 4.2/Examples/FF Examples: No such file or directory du: /mac/local/MCL 4.2/Patches 4.2: No such file or directory du: /mac/local/PsyScope.1.2.2.PPC: No such file or directory du: /mac/Printers/HP LaserJet folder: No such file or directory du: /mac/tmp: No such file or directory du: /mac/Web Pages/rab-pix: No such file or directory du: /mac/wrk: No such file or directory

and at the same time, the console says (just once):

hfs_bfind: corrupted b-tree 4.

Some (probably all, I haven't checked thoroughly) of these nonexistent directories are also the ones that didn't get backed up in the post-crash image.

Also, even though the Mac, and now df reports that this drive is almost completely full:

Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on /dev/hda 3906600 3906240 360 100% /mac

du (and the mac-to-mac backup) only find 1729980k.

So, my guess is that there is some disconnection between the directory structure and the files on the device.

My question is: even though Norton Utilities couldn't fix it, is there any chance I could walk through the directory structure and the unaccounted for locations on the disk to get some of this stuff back?

BTW, I am interested in this out of curiosity more than anything else. I believe that backups made over time before the drive crashed will have the missing files. I am just interested in finding out what the underlying problem is.

Michael A. Erickson erickson@cmu.edu