Help with HFSJ

[UzY3L]

Hello.
First of all, let me just say that I apologize if you don't understand something from what I am saying. It's 2a.m. and I'm mentally exhausted. Also, I'm barely scratching the surface as a n00b on the whole OSX86 thing so please, bare with me.
My girlfriend has a laptop, an Intel based one. Her brother dual-booted her laptop with XP and Mac OS (10.4 or 10.5) and patched XP to recognize Mac OS X partitions (at least, that's what I think he did).
All of a sudden, her Data( G: ) drive started acting up. Sometimes disappearing. This was happening in windows. According to windows the file system type of the drive is HFSJ.
So she booted to Mac OS and it said something about backing up her data and formatting (the conversation was over the phone so I apologize for the lack of details). Being a complete n00b, I googled on how to use Disk Utility to repair a disk in Mac OS.
So she ran Disk Utility on the G drive and it said the following :
Disk utility stopped verifying data because the following error was encountered : filessystem verify or repair failed
And also, lower down it said : invalid sibling link
She's at college and all her stuff (projects, homework, assignments, documents etc.) is on her G drive. She's really messed up and crying about it. Please help me, guys

[xXrkidXx]

MacDrive reads HFSJ, and it was kinda invented for this sort of thing lol...

But i don't know if u have the time to buy a copy. If she needs her stuff now

[UzY3L]

Ok, but I guess MacDrive is already installed because windows can see her G drive. The problem is that in windows, the G drive is not displayed in My Computer and when she boots into Mac, it tells her that she cannot write to the drive, only read. She accesed the option "info data" (I don't know if that is in windows or Mac OS) and it told her that she can only read from the drive.
What is wrong with it? This happened all of a sudden, last night.

[thorazine74]

If Disk Utility cannot repair the volume there is definitely something wrong with it. I would forget about MacDrive, if Mac cant access it MacDrive wont too.
If she can read from the drive while in OS X and there are no corrupted files I would just make an image with Carbon Copy Cloner before something worse happens and then, and only then, try to fix it. Cant help you with that though, I'm not sure how to do that if Disk Utility says it cant fix it, maybe some third party software like Disk Warrior can do it but I think none of them are free...

[xXrkidXx]

if she can boot her Mac, then I suggest that she backup her projects, ect, to a flash drive and get them on windows before anything else happens.

[uman]

The xX kid is right. She needs to back up her files first. Invalid sibling happens when the disk catalog (loosely speaking-- pointers to where the bits of the files are) is corrupted. In most cases, this results from underlying hardware errors (her drive may be gradually failing). But it's also possible that it was a bug on MacDrive's part, which corrupted the catalog.

Whatever. Point being, can anything be done? It *may* be possible to fix it with a commercial tool like DiskWarrior. She can also try the following (adapted from: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20070204093925888):

1. Boot into single user mode. Hit F8 and type -s and hit enter.
2. Type /bin/df and look for the drive that has her data. Hopefully she'll see something like this:
   

   /dev/disk0s2    81875392 76037824   5837568    93%    /Volumes/DATA

3. Type /sbin/umount /dev/disk0s2 replacing disk0s2 with whatever disk her data is on. Now, it shouldn't be mounted, so this is just in case it is.
4. Type /sbin/fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk0s2
5. Hopefully this should fix the problem.

Apple's man page for fsck_hfs says:

-r Rebuild the catalog file on the specified file system. This option currently will only work if there is enough contiguous space on the specified file system for a new catalog file and if there is no damage to the leaf nodes in the existing catalog file.