Why do my Mac partitions keep getting serious errors?

[lunar7]

Hi all,

Hoping to work out a long term problem I've had with maintaining integrity of my Mac partition on several builds, including a 4530s and more recently an HP Envy 20 both running 10.8.5.

It seems that some combination of events fairly regularly (every couple of months at least) will mess up my Mac partition, and the tell-tale sign is that Chameleon will boot and show some kind of namespace-style file name instead of the Mac disk name.

I.e. "Mac OS" becomes "com.aaaaaaa.bbbbbbb(.plist?)" on Chameleon, and will not boot.

Most of the time I can fix this by booting to USB installer and repairing the disk, but quite frequently the repair will not work, and I will have to back up from Time Machine (as I am doing right now, for the first time, on my latest build, the HP Envy).

I really want to get to the bottom of this and find out why this is happening, and how I can prevent the issue.
Not only is is annoying to have to fix the issue all the time, but I am worried that some day I will lose key data by not having backed up to Time Machine recently right when it happens.

Thanks for any advice to help me to resolve this persisting issue.

Details:
Both machines are running Win 8 and Mac 10.8, and the 4530s is running Ubuntu as well.

 

[RehabMan]

Hi all,

Hoping to work out a long term problem I've had with maintaining integrity of my Mac partition on several builds, including a 4530s and more recently an HP Envy 20 both running 10.8.5.

It seems that some combination of events fairly regularly (every couple of months at least) will mess up my Mac partition, and the tell-tale sign is that Chameleon will boot and show some kind of namespace-style file name instead of the Mac disk name.

I.e. "Mac OS" becomes "com.aaaaaaa.bbbbbbb(.plist?)" on Chameleon, and will not boot.

Most of the time I can fix this by booting to USB installer and repairing the disk, but quite frequently the repair will not work, and I will have to back up from Time Machine (as I am doing right now, for the first time, on my latest build, the HP Envy).

I really want to get to the bottom of this and find out why this is happening, and how I can prevent the issue.
Not only is is annoying to have to fix the issue all the time, but I am worried that some day I will lose key data by not having backed up to Time Machine recently right when it happens.

Thanks for any advice to help me to resolve this persisting issue.

Details:
Both machines are running Win 8 and Mac 10.8, and the 4530s is running Ubuntu as well.

Without knowing more about how you installed OS X and what kind of software you installed after, no ideas.

 

[lunar7]

Thanks.

Ok, I'll try to be as helpful as possible. It just happened again with my HP ProBook, this time there was no change to the boot partition shown in Chameleon, but it would not boot, and it's happened so often that I have started to guess it's that issue.

This time I tried to go through the same process, putting in the installer USB key, and when it wasn't detected, I went to BIOS, and seemingly many of my BIOS settings were reset (WIFI was off, Legacy USB was off...). Strange!

Anyway, this time I was able to repair the disk correctly again.


So here are my two setups where this is happening:

1. HP ProBook 4530s
500 GB SSD Samsung 840 split in half, one running Mountain Lion 10.8.5, the other Windows 8.1 Update
1 TB HDD in optical bay, about 250GB running Ubuntu 12.04, the rest was an exFAT shared partition that I am now replacing with a FAT partition for shared data, as I almost lost all the exFAT data, assumably due to shoddy support in Mac OS.

2. HP Envy 20 Touchsmart AIO
1 TB HDD split in half, one running Mountain Lion 10.8.5, the other Windows 8.1 Update

I have done at least 3 other builds that I work on regularly, all not on HP hardware, and none of these have the same issues. My first suspect is that it is something due to using HP hardware, possibly with Chameleon rather than Clover.

What other information can I provide that might be helpful? I would do anything to resolve these kinds of issues once and for all!

 

[lunar7]

Here are some of the errors I get in the repair utility:

Missing thread record (with or without ID=xxxxxxxxxx)
Incorrect number of thread records
Invalid B-Tree Header
Invalid volume free block count

Volume header needs minor repair


I guess what I am wondering, so I can do some investigating of my own too, is what kinds of things can even do this to a disk? I do recall over the years having a couple of times where chkdsk had to run on Windows, but an order of magnitude less frequently!

 

[RehabMan]

Here are some of the errors I get in the repair utility:

Missing thread record (with or without ID=xxxxxxxxxx)
Incorrect number of thread records
Invalid B-Tree Header
Invalid volume free block count

Volume header needs minor repair


I guess what I am wondering, so I can do some investigating of my own too, is what kinds of things can even do this to a disk? I do recall over the years having a couple of times where chkdsk had to run on Windows, but an order of magnitude less frequently!

Are you using software on Windows/Linux to read/write your OS X volumes?

And since these disks are hybrid GPT/MBR, is your hybrid synced properly? That is, no edits to partitions on Windows, all edits done either in OS X via Disk Utility or Linux gparted followed by gptsync?

 

[lunar7]

I definitely haven't messed with the partition scheme from Windows, in fact, I am trying to get it set up a certain way and leave it that way for the long term if possible (I just have to switch my shared storage partition to FAT from exFAT, which I'll do from Mac).

As for the writes to Mac disks from Windows, I have been trying to avoid that by setting up the rather large shared storage. However I had always been of the impression that it's fair game to read off the other disks from each OS. It could be possible that some amount of writing is going on somehow when doing this.

Right now Linux is the OS that sees other OSes, but the other OSes can't see it. It's fine because only Windows has a driver for that disk format as far as I know, and I would rarely need to read off the Linux disk for anything anyways.

However, Windows has MacDrive installed and Mac has Tuxera NTFS installed. I suspect that inadvertent writes made possible with these drivers may be the real culprit.

I am starting to wonder if I should uninstall these utilities and restrict myself to read/writing to the shared FAT partition exclusively. It would be tedious if I forget to move files I want to share off the OS partitions before I switch OSes, but if it makes the problems I am having impossible, then it might be a worthwhile compromise.

 

[RehabMan]

I definitely haven't messed with the partition scheme from Windows, in fact, I am trying to get it set up a certain way and leave it that way for the long term if possible (I just have to switch my shared storage partition to FAT from exFAT, which I'll do from Mac).

As for the writes to Mac disks from Windows, I have been trying to avoid that by setting up the rather large shared storage. However I had always been of the impression that it's fair game to read off the other disks from each OS. It could be possible that some amount of writing is going on somehow when doing this.

Right now Linux is the OS that sees other OSes, but the other OSes can't see it. It's fine because only Windows has a driver for that disk format as far as I know, and I would rarely need to read off the Linux disk for anything anyways.

However, Windows has MacDrive installed and Mac has Tuxera NTFS installed. I suspect that inadvertent writes made possible with these drivers may be the real culprit.

I am starting to wonder if I should uninstall these utilities and restrict myself to read/writing to the shared FAT partition exclusively. It would be tedious if I forget to move files I want to share off the OS partitions before I switch OSes, but if it makes the problems I am having impossible, then it might be a worthwhile compromise.

Definitely stay away from MacDrive/Tuxera. First of all on the OS X side, you can already read NTFS drives using native OS X capabilities. And if all you need is read capability for HFS+ on the Windows side, install BootCamp Windows file system drivers from Apple.

It is my opinion your corruption is caused by using those file system drivers MacDrive/Tuxera.