Macintosh HD Disk Utility error-can't unmount

[echinoderm]

Hi. We had major storms come through last night complete with a extended power failure to the house. Ever since then, I have not been able to boot my Mac Mini. I get a folder with a '?' in it after the system start sound during power on.

The reason I am posting is I am pretty sure SD was running at the time. So following the Troubleshooting section in the UG, I invoked Disk Utility off my Install Disk and did a 'Repair Disk' on my Macintosh HD, my normal startup drive. I get the following error:

Repairing disk failed with error
Could not unmount disk

Any ideas? I fear I was in a critical state in SD at the time of the failure and things are slightly off preventing the boot to proceed from my source disk.

Thanks

[dnanian]

I don't think the problem with your source drive has anything to do with SD: we don't modify the source drive while we're copying, only the destination.

If you had a big power failure while you were running, though, almost anything could have happened. Couldn't unmount, though, is weird. Are you sure you were running from the CD or DVD? Did you try restarting again and retrying?

[echinoderm]

I don't think the problem with your source drive has anything to do with SD: we don't modify the source drive while we're copying, only the destination.

If you had a big power failure while you were running, though, almost anything could have happened. Couldn't unmount, though, is weird. Are you sure you were running from the CD or DVD? Did you try restarting again and retrying?

Yeah, I tried several times and without fail, I get the folder ? error. The only time I don't get that error is when I start from the install DVD, and that's when Disk Utility tells me forget it on 'Repair Disk'. I have Applecare so I guess I will pursue that.

One last question: considering I can't get started up except from DVD, are there any Disk Utility checks I should run against the destination drive to make sure he is SD usable? I've been running daily scheduled smart updates to this FW drive...

Thanks again.

[dnanian]

You can certainly run Disk Utility on it, but I'd actually keep it safe, since it's likely your good copy...