MacOS-X File System Layer is faulty.

smirclesmircle
Posted:
in macOS edited January 2014
Here is the case:

after I double-tested that the file system of my Ti 400 was clean, I enabled journaling and ran happy ever after - until...

... yesterday, after a record 45 days of uptime, drag-and-drop stopped working systemwide. So I decided to reboot the machine (which went fine), install the 8 updates that had accumulated in between boots and restarted.

Just a spinning rainbow cursor. No disk util is able to repair because of overlapping catalog extends.



OK, I have the machine running on Panther right now (my Jaguar install disks are 650Km away) and I am wondering. How could that happen?



There seems to be only one logical conclusion: Apples implementation of the HFS+ layer in MacOS-X is faulty, corrupting the file system while running.

Apple, this is really, really poor :-(
«1

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 32
    scottscott Posts: 7,431member
    I don't think with computers you can ever have "one" cause of a problem. Why can't you blame this on the journaling and not HFS+?
  • Reply 2 of 32
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Smircle



    ...OK, I have the machine running on Panther right now (my Jaguar install disks are 650Km away) and I am wondering. How could that happen?



    ...Apple, this is really, really poor :-(



    did you say ur running panther?



    unless i read wrong you have no right to copmlain to apple, i am going to assume your not a developer and if you are you should have known better



    (sorry, perhaps i'm being a little mean but its the truth)
  • Reply 3 of 32
    mccrabmccrab Posts: 201member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Smircle

    Here is the case:

    after I double-tested that the file system of my Ti 400 was clean, I enabled journaling and ran happy ever after - until...

    ... yesterday, after a record 45 days of uptime, drag-and-drop stopped working systemwide. So I decided to reboot the machine (which went fine), install the 8 updates that had accumulated in between boots and restarted.

    Just a spinning rainbow cursor. No disk util is able to repair because of overlapping catalog extends.



    OK, I have the machine running on Panther right now (my Jaguar install disks are 650Km away) and I am wondering. How could that happen?



    There seems to be only one logical conclusion: Apples implementation of the HFS+ layer in MacOS-X is faulty, corrupting the file system while running.

    Apple, this is really, really poor :-(





    There are over 7,000,000 users of OS X...and here is the first complaint about HFS+ being unreliable... and you are using a beta of Panther. Strikes me as being a gargantuan leap in logic.
  • Reply 4 of 32
    chef ramen noodlechef ramen noodle Posts: 42member
    very, very bad move leaving your jaguar disks at home.
  • Reply 5 of 32
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    so i dont sound like TOO much of an ass i will say this...good thign with today's modern mailing system you can have it in a day (least if you pay for it )
  • Reply 6 of 32
    baumanbauman Posts: 1,248member
    Erm, I think it is that he had Jag installed, it crashed, and the only thing around to reinstall was Panther.



    He also said that he had an uptime of 45 days... Panther hasn't been out for 45 days, so there's no way he could have been running it when he crashed. He just doesn't have anything better at the moment.



    However, even if you were using Jag, I think it's a little hasty to jump from "My Hard Drive Crashed" to "OS X has a faulty implementation of HFS." Something got corrupted. That's all.
  • Reply 7 of 32
    apeirosapeiros Posts: 16member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by McCrab

    There are over 7,000,000 users of OS X...and here is the first complaint about HFS+ being unreliable... and you are using a beta of Panther. Strikes me as being a gargantuan leap in logic.



    Now then here is the second complaint: I had several disk related problems with OS X which I haven't had with OS 9. It was not hardware related (occurred on more than 1 mac and with different harddisks). But I have to append that the problems only occurred when I "cross-used" OS 9(/classic) and OS X. With OS X only the problems have not occurred again.
  • Reply 8 of 32
    1337_5l4xx0r1337_5l4xx0r Posts: 1,558member
    Well, seing as how no one else on these boards has experienced your problem, it may not be OSX after all. perhaps it is your hardware, specifically your HD?



    It also sounds like your disk needs repairing and permissions fixing.
  • Reply 9 of 32
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Two points:



    Guys, give him a little slack. He's *NOT* running Panther, but Jaguar. Also, his situation sucks, I've been there.



    Smircle, it is much more likely that you have a bad disk, or bad RAM (that was my problem - the RAM was being corrupted, corrupting the catalog info, which was then being written out faithfully to disk), than you're the only person who has been bitten by some obscure but catastrophic HFS+ bug, no?



    If you can, boot into 9 somehow and run Gauge Pro, a RAM checker available on versiontracker.com. It'll eliminate one variable that most people never think of. Not only that, but RAM is cheap.



    If the RAM checks out OK (and no, you probably can't just run Apple's RAM checker under X, it fails to perform a specific test that mine was failed on), then have the drive checked out by DriveX, Tech Tool Pro, etc.



    I'll bet it's one of these two items, almost certainly, and this will save you the four months it took for me to diagnose it. :/ (Several re-installs, a new drive cable assembly, and a new drive later...)
  • Reply 10 of 32
    drewpropsdrewprops Posts: 2,321member
    I too had the OS X blue screen of death, back in May, running Jag on an iBook. No idea what went wanky. I ascribed it to the first version of Safari that featured tabbed browsing...but I really can't back that up. It was devastating, as it happened in the middle of big project and really made me scramble to keep up with my workload.



    I didn't enable journaling, as I have no idea how to do that (nor do I believe that I require that feature). If there is some kind of fault with the file system then its something that can't remain undocumented for very long.



    The solution in my case was to have the techs replace the 20Gb drive with a 40Gb drive and reinstall Jag. I just wish that I knew what went wrong....
  • Reply 11 of 32
    t'hain esh kelcht'hain esh kelch Posts: 1,274member
    One question, do you run BitTorrent? 'cause that program has caused exactly that problem on two machines at my house... Both running 10.2.6.
  • Reply 12 of 32
    smirclesmircle Posts: 1,035member
    OK here's a status update:

    - No, I was running 10.2.5, *not* Panther. I am no ass to put a pre-release OS on a production machine.

    - The HD tested physically OK (of course thats no 100% proof).

    - After spending most of the weekend trying to repair my file-system from every OS left to me (thats 9 and 10.3), I eventually pulled my home folder off the partition and reformatted. Lucky thing I never trusted Apple enough to put valuable data on the boot partition but still keep partitioning my drives like in the old days.

    - Toast would not run under Panther and the 10.3 Finder would not burn toast images of 10.2 I obtained from a friend. 9 to the rescue (what the heck I am going to do with my next Mac which will not support 9 anymore I wouldn't know).



    BUT the interesting thing is: I am not the only one. I observe a lot of Mac-Users having the same problems eventually and I always put the blame on crashes and not enabling journaling. Now it bit me with journaling enabled. I do not believe that any application short of low-level disk tools should be able to damage a file system in a Unix-kind-of-OS, so I still believe Apple botched the HFS+ layer in OS-X.
  • Reply 13 of 32
    t'hain esh kelcht'hain esh kelch Posts: 1,274member
    I'll try again, Bit torrent????
  • Reply 14 of 32
    smirclesmircle Posts: 1,035member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by T'hain Esh Kelch

    I'll try again, Bit torrent????



    Nope

    And of course, an high-level application like bittorrent should not be able to corrupt a file system.
  • Reply 15 of 32
    jlljll Posts: 2,713member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Smircle

    OBUT the interesting thing is: I am not the only one. I observe a lot of Mac-Users having the same problems eventually and I always put the blame on crashes and not enabling journaling. Now it bit me with journaling enabled. I do not believe that any application short of low-level disk tools should be able to damage a file system in a Unix-kind-of-OS, so I still believe Apple botched the HFS+ layer in OS-X.



    Why are you so sure that there isn't something wrong the the hard drive itself? Journaling won't save you from hardware errors.
  • Reply 16 of 32
    smirclesmircle Posts: 1,035member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by JLL

    Why are you so sure that there isn't something wrong the the hard drive itself? Journaling won't save you from hardware errors.



    Of course, I cannot be 100% sure. Thats a given.

    But:

    - I believe, about halve of the MacOS-X users I know had a damaged file system one time or other. For some time, I did attribute it to installing KEXT's and stuff, then to crashes and not performing fscks afterwards.



    - Formatting and reinstalling did not produce any drive error.



    - During the whole 2 years this very HD is in operation, it never lost data, crashed the system or something.



    - In some 10 years of using various Macs and PCs, I have only once witnessed a hardware error destroying a FS (an Athlon board). However, I have had my share of faulty FS implentations in 7.5.x and troubles when using RAMDoubler on 7.6.

    It's Occams razor: software bugs are more likely than hardware faults, so it's a software bug unless proven otherwise.



    I started this thread mainly so others have a chance to be alert when their Macs just out of a sudden refuse to work. This may not be the fault of some crash, some application going wrong, but Apples HFS+ implementation.
  • Reply 17 of 32
    jlljll Posts: 2,713member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Smircle

    It's Occams razor: software bugs are more likely than hardware faults, so it's a software bug unless proven otherwise.



    It doesn't have to be a software bug in HFS+. Remember that HFS+ is years old by now and a corrupted file doesn't have to be corrupted by the file system - the application writing the file can corrupt the file.



    Btw. the missing drag'n'drop you mention is usually fixed by deleting you cache files.



    Quote:

    Originally posted by Smircle

    I believe, about halve of the MacOS-X users I know had a damaged file system one time or other



    What on earth are you doing?
  • Reply 18 of 32
    smirclesmircle Posts: 1,035member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by JLL

    It doesn't have to be a software bug in HFS+. Remember that HFS+ is years old by now and a corrupted file doesn't have to be corrupted by the file system - the application writing the file can corrupt the file.



    Only that no file was corrupted, but the catalog extends. I don't exactly know what it is, but it sounds like part of the disk catalog.

    In a Unix-like environment, sure as hell no higher-level application should be allowed to write directly to the disk catalog (that was not even the case with the Apple ][ 20 years ago).
  • Reply 19 of 32
    gardnerjgardnerj Posts: 167member
    joining the party late i know but i assume you tried doing an fsck on the partition? If it was a file system corruption fsck would probably fix it. if it was a hardware problem it would probably flush it out.



    just a thought.
  • Reply 20 of 32
    kickahakickaha Posts: 8,760member
    Smircle:



    Check. Your. RAM. Seriously.



    My drive was 100% fine.



    I had catalog extent problems.



    They came out of nowhere.



    It sounds *suspiciously* familiar.







    The catalog extent is a file, just like any other, it just happens to be controlled by the OS filesystem layer, that's all. If it gets corrupted at any point, (including in RAM), then you're hosed.



    Considering that you've probably eliminated the drive as the problem, (I assume you also checked the integrity of the cabling?) and that, as many people have pointed out, the likelihood of you getting bitten by a software bug in a battle-tested layer is pretty slim...



    Check. Your. RAM.



    I can't say this enough.
Sign In or Register to comment.