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Product

DiskWarrior

Question

Is DiskWarrior capable of repairing an "Invalid Sibling Link" error?

Answer

This is an error you definitely don't want. It indicates that parts of your directory, and therefore some of your files and folders, are inaccessible.

Mac OS Standard (HFS) and Mac OS Extended (HFS Plus) disk directories have a very complex structure. Each file or folder (item) on a disk has an entry in the disk's directory. These entries are in order of enclosing folder and then item name. This is similar to a yellow pages directory being ordered by type of business and then business name. Just like a yellow pages directory, the disk directory has pages except that its pages are called nodes. Unlike the yellow pages, nodes are dynamic and change as you add and delete items. It's sort of like a realtime yellow pages.

Imagine that the pages of the yellow pages are not in order and at the bottom of each page it says "Continued on page n," where n is the page that contains the next set of listings for the particular type of business that you're looking up. Well nodes are not arranged in order and each node has a reference, or link, to the next node that contains the next set of ordered items. This link is what is referred to as the sibling link.

A sibling link error is a bad link to another node. Either the link refers to the wrong node or it refers to an invalid node. As I said, a sibling link error makes some of your items inaccessible and can even prevent a disk from mounting. Sibling errors are notoriously difficult for some of the patching type of disk repair utilities to repair. Sometimes the repairs fail and the directory is damaged further. If a disk with a sibling link error is still mountable, I would advise backing up the accessible files and folders on the disk before attempting to repair it with that type of disk repair utility.





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# Product Version(s) Question
97 DiskWarrior 4.x
98 DiskWarrior 4.0
99 DiskWarrior 4.x
100 DiskWarrior All
101 DiskWarrior All
102
103 DiskWarrior All
104 DiskWarrior All
105 DiskWarrior All
106 DiskWarrior All
107 DiskWarrior All
108 DiskWarrior 4.x
109 DiskWarrior 4.x
110 DiskWarrior 3.x
111 DiskWarrior 3.0.3 - 4.x

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