Stephen Groom Music Producer? Poker Pro? Sports Bettor? Tune in next post to find out

Hackintosh is back!!!

As some of you more regular readers may have noticed, I am back from a period of absence.  This is mainly due to my main PC (my Hackintosh) having a little harddrive trouble.

I don't know what caused it, but all of a sudden, after a stint in Windows, located on the same harddrive as MacOS, the MacOS partition refused to play nice and took 15 minutes or so to boot.  I tried everything to get to the bottom of it and there were no errors shown in the verbose boot or system.log

Eventually, after un-overclocking the rig, I ruled out all hardware besides the Harddrive.  Windows was having a little bit of a grumble about that too and partition magic identified a number of "boot sector problems" which it fixed.  As this didn't fix my OSX issue, it was time to dig deeper.

Off I popped and booted my iAtkos install DVD and launched "Disk Utility". This identified a number of problems

• Invalid volume file count
• Invalid volume directory count
• Missing thread record

I then set it away for an hour doing a command something along the lines of:

fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y &&fsck_hfs /dev/diskXsY -f -y && ... ...

but that didn't help me either.

After a little Googling, I found that Disk Warrior was the solution, so I burned it to a DVD and tried to boot.. D'oh!  My Hackintosh can't boot OSX native DVDs and it took me a few days to work this out.. stupid.. I tried to launch Disk Warrior from within OSX but it wouldn't do any of the fancy stuff to the disk as it was in use.

Sooooo.. After playing with the Chameleon bootloader for a few days and giving up on that route, I had to take drastic action.

I did a little reshuffling of my harddrives and made room for a partition.  I then installed ANOTHER copy of iAtkos onto this and booted into that partition.  On this partition I installed Disk Warrior.  FINALLY I was able to repair the disk and this is where I am now.  I had a quick read through the files that were damaged/deleted and there were a few worrying ones in /System/Library/Extensions that were deleted and the rest were all chinese user manuals and recovered files.  These didn't bother me too much so I booted and all is well, so far.

I hope this wee guide helps somebody diagnose there problem faster than me and I hope this will see me returning to the internetz more!

Thanks
Stephen