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I have a damaged "B-tree" what the hell does that mean?
- Thread starter WillMak
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if you launch 'disk utility', does it see your harddrive? if yes then try to repair it. i've had damaged b-tree quite often, although i don't know what it exactly mean i was always able to get it repaired 
a similar thing happened to me, although i was totally unable to repair it. in the end i used a program called data rescue x. it got almost all of my stuff back in perfect working order. i then had to wipe the drive.
good luck.
good luck.
You will probably have to use Disk Warrior or the system CD to recover your data to another drive, and then repartition that drive to get it running again. Personally I would recover to another drive and throw the problematic drive away. Hard drives have a short life span, no need to keep around a device that is showing signs of failure.
I agree with the use of Disk Warrior to repair b-tree errors, but certainly not with throwing the drive away.
These kinds of errors can be created in all sorts of ways not related to hardware failure. With the right recovery tools, they can be easily repaired, and the drive won't even need to be reformatted in order to sail along happily for many more years."b-tree" is short for "balanced tree". I'm surprized Apple would present such an unimportant technical term to a user.
The way a "tree" works is simple. Lets say you want to find someone by their last name so you build an index that reads for "A-L" go to room 5 for "M-Z" go to room 10. Then inside room 5 you see a sign that reads "for A-G go to room 2, for H-L room 3" Now where the "B" or "Balance" comes in they add one more little detail -- they adjust the letter ranges so that at each decision point the two groups of people are equal. This means that they have to switch the signs a lot as people come and go in and out of the system but if you do this you are always certain to have the minimum number of levels before you find the person.
How does it know the b-tree is broken. maybe a "room number" points to a room that does not exist. Maybe the letter on the left is higher than the letter on the right. Maybe some sequence of signs lead in a circle. May in the A-K room you see a Q-S sign. When the file system is mounted it looks for errors like these and a few more. Either way it can be fixed by simply scanning all the people, reassigning them to rooms and writting all new signs.
Of course on the disk "people" are files and "rooms" are blocks of disk sectors.
Ouch I had a damaged B-Tree because I pressed a button in TechTool Pro and lost all the information on my drive (I didn't feel like paying to have it all recovered).