I recently bought a used 76GB HD from a friend. Upon getting it, I formatted it to have a 10GB partition and a a 66GB partition. I had backed up the HD that this drive was replacing, and copied it all to the 10GB partition (Mac OS 9 System Folder too).
Ever since then, whenever I verified the 10GB partition with Disk Utitlity I would get an error of 'Invalid Key Length' halfway through the test. It says that it can't fix it. Until recently, I merely ignored it and continued on. Tonight, though, when I was having a video conference I suddenly got a kernal panic, my first one, and had to restart. The bad thing is, once I restarted the 10GB partition was no longer mounted. I can't seem to manually mount it with Disk Utitlity either.
I think that it can't be the entire hard drive because the larger partition mounts fine, and I've being doing a lot on it lately.
Does anyone know if the 'Invalid Key Length' error is keeping the partition from mounting? If so, is there any hidden utility in Mac OS X that could repair it?
i thought the first partition was suupoesed to be no larger than 8 gb on the older machines? are you using OSX too? i would try it in a newer machine, back up your files and make the first partition smaller, see if that helps.
AFAIK The 8GB limit is only on the PowerMac G3 beige. Somthing to do with ROM and the IDE bus. The B+W should work ok
yup b&w is like a g4, except only not a g4. the only thing abotu the b&w is, theres a 128gb limit in wich you need an ata controller card to get rid of.
I couldn't figure out what the 'Invalid key length' error was. So, I just wiped the drive and reformatted it. After I moved everything back over, I checked the drive and everything seems to be alright.
you should probably have zeroed off all th sectors first. but if it work then oh well.
It is not possible to zero all sectors on an IDE hard drive. This is only on a SCSI hard drive.
You can Zero all data, you can't low-level format IDE drives
It is a serious error, and AFAIK neither DiskWarrior, Disk Guardian, TechTool Pro nor Drive 10, SpeedTools have any solution other than backing up the disk content, and formatting the drive.
It is no good idea to keep on working with a volume which has already gotten this error.
In your place I'd rather try to mount the partition (with one of the afore mentioned utilities) in order to make a backup and then formatting it.