any invalid sibling link errors out there?

[ester]

my wife and i both use seagate externals and had never encountered any problems till now. her drive will no longer mount but is seen by disk utility. repair and verify both say invalid sibling link. has anybody seen this error? all of her med school work is on this drive and she is freaking out. would disk warrior clear this up? i've read about booting in single user mode and using fsck. this is new scary territory. has anyone swam in these waters before?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Similar problem recently with an internal drive not being seen by the system but seen by disk utility. That was on my wife's iBook (her internal boot drive just stopped being seen).

Booting the iBook in target mode and running disk utility saw the disk but wouldn't repair it. Very odd.

My solution was to boot my G5 from the Leopard install disk and run disk utility from there (pretending that I wanted to install Leopard - then shifting to disk utility).

From there, I was able to repair permissions and the drive was back in business. Again, that was her only drive and her boot drive, so it was critical (all her graduate work in education was on that drive!).

Now it's fine. Hope that helps. Again, the G5 (10.5.1) would not allow the disk to be repaired unless I booted the G5 from the install disk. Don't know why, but that's what did it (after about 6 hours of trying!)

[ester]

thanks for taking a crack at it MLC but no dice yet. i always thought that the boot from install disk was a bit odd for a permission/repair fix. it's not as if the install disk has the most up to date info to correct the disk since the OS updates seem to change more than what Apple lets on to.

i'm wondering if Disk Warrior fixes anything like this.

the external has a folder for all of her time machine data.

the last update to Warrior mentions time machine. i'm guessing that maybe some incremental time machine change may have triggered this. no help on the apple support site on these crazy siblings...... the search continues....

[MIDI Life Crisis]

i always thought that the boot from install disk was a bit odd for a permission/repair fix....

HAve you tried it? It's not just a matter of the latest version of the software. Booting from the install disk places the Mac in a different mode and allows access that normal booting doesn't always allow. I guess it's a bit like booting in single user mode, but with a unique interface.

Anyway, it would be worth a try, but the choice is yours.

[ester]

sorry that i was unclear. you betcha i sure did try it. that was my first guess too.

[kelldammit]

found this on the web, dunno if it'll be any help, but this guy says it fixed it for him:

How to fix the Invalid Sibling Link error

28 Sep 2007, 1:35 am
I got this error after a software update that turns on journaling on the Mac OS X filesystem.

The update instructs the user to reboot using the Install Disk and running a Repair operation using the Disk Utility. That was when I discovered the error. Apparently, even the Repair operation could not fix the error.

Here is the solution, adapted from macosxhints.com:

Reboot into Single User mode (restart, and press and hold Command-S). You will see a black screen with a command prompt.
Type fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk0s2 and press Enter. This will repair the error, and will take a while (~10 minutes). Wait for the operation to complete i.e. until the command prompt appears again.
Type fsck -fy and press Enter. This will check the filesystem again, and confirm that it is now OK. Again, wait for the operation to complete i.e. until the command prompt appears again.
Type reboot and press Enter. This will restart the system to normal.
Good luck!

P.S.: If this worked for you, please do let me know here It may serve as a confirmation so that other people would be willing try this method too.