Well, DiskWarrior kinda sorta worked! What it does is
– examine the content of your disk (which takes a LONG time),
– build a new directory based on what it has found,
– mount a fake disk on your desktop to let you examine what the fixed disk will look like,
– and then, you decide to commit the changes to disk or not.
I presume TechTool does the same thing, except that it just told me that my « fixed disk » would contain 30 Gig (instead of 100+ so I said, er, no).
I told DiskWarrior to go ahead and replace the damaged directory with the rebuilt directory, because it sure seemed like most of my documents and apps were going to be saved.
Not surprisingly, my fixed disk wouldn’t boot. So I booted on my Apple Installation DVD and did a simple « update » installation, hoping that the damaged or missing system files would be replaced.
And then…my hard disk booted-up fine, right into my familiar personalized computing environment. PHEW!
After exploring a bit, it turns out that
– 5 applications were corrupt and wouldn’t launch and had to be reinstalled.
– Virtual PC behaved as if it had just been installed and asked for a serial number. No biggie.
– ALL of my Safari bookmarks are gone. A bummer !
– One of my little-used email mailboxes was read-only.
Considering that last night, I was 99% sure I was going to have to wipe my disk and start from scratch, this felt like a pretty good tradeoff to me! 5 bad apps out of dozens ain’t too shabby. I’m assuming there are more damaged files lurking around, but after several hours of mucking about, I haven’t bumped into one yet.
DiskWarrior has a good reputation, and I can see why.
Now, what I should probably do, is what Apple calls an « Archive and Install » which builds you a fresh new system, and then imports existing user files. I will do it, when I have less of a headache, because it involves reinstalling a lot of applications and drivers from scratch, and it won’t do any good to any damaged user-data that might still lay undiscovered…
Signing off…