i hope someone can help me because one of my hard drive's partitions suddenly started to act up on me. and some really important school files are still there

im using a hackintosh right now, 10.4.8. its an acer aspire5500z, 40gb toshiba hdd, 1.5 gb ram, intel 945gma. i doubt that any of that matters. i'm not an expert of any sort, but i dont think my hardware has anything to do with this, except for the hard drive itself

anyways, what happened was one time, the computer froze up so i had to do a manual shutdown. then, after restarting, i find out that my other partition (obviously not the startup disk), isn't mounting. i use disk utility to check if i can do anything about it.

i try to mount the disk from there, and the log actually says the mount of disk "x" is succesful, but the disk still isnt mounting. then i try to verify/repair the disk and the following errors come up:

-------- (Verify log)
Invalid node structure.
Invalid B-tree node size.
Invalid node structure.
Invalid B-tree node size.
The volume needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair
---------

--------- (repair log)
Invalid node structure.
Invalid B-tree node size.
Invalid node structure.
Invalid B-tree node size.
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit


1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
----------


i really hope someone knows how to deal with this

i haven't backed up the latest version of my thesis, and its there in that partition

before i decide to just wipe out the whole drive (and go back to windows.. boo), i really hope that someone has an idea on how to make this right.

thanks guys!

Try Testdisk :
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

hey man, thanks for that link! though it failed to recover my hard drive (too much bad sectors to be safely recovered) the add-on that came with it, PhotoRec, helped me recover some of the files from the lost partition, even after i erased the whole thing.

for anyone experiencing the same problems, i suggest you do try this piece of software, and it's free