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A possible fix for 'overlapped extent allocation' errors
Authored by: ankh on Mar 06, '03 12:20:15AM

Pismo 400, OSX 10.2.4, and this happened to me last Friday, after one of those "gray screen saying you need to reboot in many languages events" I've gotten used to them, since AppleCare says they have never found a hardware problem with my Pismo. Some people just have bad luck.

Disk Utility this time found 9 overlapped extent allocations -- listed one number four times, then five other numbers, said it had fixed it, but hadn't. Tech Tool Pro couldn't fix it and said to recover files and reformat. Drive 10 has always just crashed my computer when I restart after using it and never worked. Disk First Aid claimed to have fixed it but failed. Disk Warrior claimed to have fixed it but hung during verification. DW support said rename the Users folder as aaUsers and see if it hangs earlier -- it did.

Threw out all the caches and that did not help. Tried all the above again and that did not help -- it's not always the cache.

DW support said DW may die if it hits a non-ASCII first letter in a filename. I found I had a lot of files, system files, with a blank space as the first name (huh?). Deleted the system from the drive. Still hung. Bought a spare hard drive.

Oh, did I mention that when I went to my mirror backup external drive, it also had the exact same overlapping extent allocation files? And I had run the disk utility == always do -- after I used TriBackup to mirror the main drive, and it had been fine the night before. Creepy.

So I bought another drive at Computerware at 5pm Sunday, copied everything with TriBackup.

Deleted the user files, still hung. Reformatted, wrote zeros, and am reinstalling.

Apple doesn't recommend or support Tech Tool even though they distribute it, and apparently claims nobody needs a disk utility with OSX.

It's always nice to talk to Apple about these problems. Such a nice world their tech support people must live in. They never have heard of such problems happening to anyone else. Oh, and firewire ports never fail, hinges never crack, and screens don't turn pink. If they were telling investors this kind of lie in securities deals the SEC would close'em down, but since they're telling customers it's considered puffery, legally not a problem.

"If you can't make it good, make it look good." --- William Gates, 1995

Reformatted. Reinstalled. Gonna do it on the other two drives as well.



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