[Macpartners] Serious, recurring disk navigation problems: Help needed

[Susan Midlarsky]

Setup:

Macbook Pro, 1st gen, 100 gb HD
Tibook FW, 60 GB HD
Iogear 320 GB external HD
6 GB mini external HD

My MBP's hard drive went nuts last Friday, exhibiting all kinds of  
corruption. It was unrecoverable using the standard tools, including  
Diskwarrior. On inspection and attempted recovery with Data Rescue  
II, all the directories inside the User directory showed as size zero  
bytes, though the amount of free space was consistent with the files  
still being there.

No big deal, I had a backup from 3 months ago, so I would just  
recover recent files, right? I was able to recover the majority of  
the user files with DRII, though some were corrupted and  
irretrievable. I reformatted and reinstalled the drive and sent the  
laptop to Applecare, since I think the problem was brought on by a  
bad fan.

To be able to do the recovery, though, I had to start from something  
other than the install DVDs. I have 2 external drives, one with the  
backup (320 MB, 3 partitions). It was unable to boot my computer, and  
I couldn't reinstall the Mac OS onto it. I found out later that this  
was because it was partitioned with Apple Partition Map, while you  
need GUID for Intel macs. So I partitioned the little drive with  
that, installed the base system, and installed the utilities onto  
that, saving the rescued files onto a different partition on the 320  
drive.

Then two days ago, to my horror, when checking out the backup from  
the Tibook, which I'm now using full time, I found the user  
directories on the backup had the same problem. The subdirectories  
(Desktop, Documents, Music, etc.) all showed as zero bytes when  
clicked on, though they'd showed as fine earlier.

I tried the standbys: repair perms, diskwarrior, etc., but no use. So  
I tried to recover data from the backup to another partition.

No good. Same thing. While the recovered files from the MBP were  
fine, the newly-recovered files wouldn't show up. The free space on  
the hard drive remains accurate to how many files there should be,  
but something is not right.

Trying to rebuild the directories using Diskwarrior shows up  
something even odder. When rebuilding, previewing the old and new  
directories allows me to browse through and see the files that are,  
indeed, there. However, as soon as the rebuild is done, I can't see  
the contents - Finder shows them as zero bytes.

Tried navigating using Terminal, but hitting the zero directories  
returned a permissions error. Tried rebuilding perms; no use. Sudoing  
to the directory just bounced me back to the previous directory.

So now I'm stuck. What is making these directories unviewable? I'm  
started from a different machine, different file system, rebuilt  
directories, etc. If you have a clue, please pass it on - the more  
technical the explanation, the better!


Thank you!
Susan