My G5 Tiger installation went fine, but after a forced shut down (wouldn't shut down) I did fsck (also did Disk Utility from an external Tiger utilities drive) and got a message that there was an "illegal name" and couldn't be repaired. The Illegal Name message appeared right after the "Checking Catalog Files"

I re-archive and installed and fsck and all was well, no "illegal name" message.

Now it has just happened again, forced shut down, fsck, illegal name.

I then booted from my Utilies drive and ran TTP 4.0.4 on it. TTP 4 found no errors.
Hoping to eliminate the illegal name error I rebuilt the directory with TTP 4.0.4. It had only the usual green changes.
Also used TTP to fix Finder errors.

After the TTP rebuild, Disk Utility still shows the Illegal name error.

I have also had some Photoshop CS2 quits, and thinking it might be some recent RAM, I ran the extended Apple Hardware test (took 2.5 hours). No faults found.

So that is where I am now. Feeling somewhat uneasy and not sure what to do next.

Any advice most welcome

Mike

Did fsck give an inode number for the file with the illegal name?

No it doesn't, no clue where it might be.

Presumably TTP doesn't check for illegal names?

Mike

I have not heard of this problem before. As soon as I can find out about just what fsck is finding when it reports an illegal file name, I will post it here.

Thanks very much!

We have not encountered this problem before. We suspect that fsck is producing a diagnosis of an illegal filename when a filename contains a character that Unix does not permit. TechTool Pro 4 does not check for these illegal characters.

One of the illegal characters, the null character, is used by Apple in the names of heavily-protected files or folders that the user is not supposed to modify. An example is the full name of the HFS+ Private Data folder. We suspect that fsck has a list of the files and folders for which Apple allows illegal characters to be used. It is possible that this list is not entirely accurate in Tiger. It would have been interesting to see if the version of fsck that comes with Panther also diagnosed the illegal filename. Instructions for running fsck to examine a volume other than the startup volume are at http://www.osxfaq.com/tutorials/fsck .

Thanks for the input.

The link you gave doesn't work for me at the moment, but since I still have a Panther volume I booted from that and did a "verify" on the Tiger volume with Disk Utility. This should be the same as doing fsck on a volume other than boot.

The Panther DU also reported the "illegal name"

Mike

You are welcome.

The link works for me now.

Thanks for reporting that you got the “illegal filename” diagnosis when running Disk Utility under Panther. At least we know that this is not a Tiger-specific problem.

That link works for me in Safari but not Firefox. This one seems to be for the same page, perhaps it will be more universal:

http://www.osxfaq.com/Tutorials/fsck/index.ws

Thanks for posting the more universal link. I had not seen the other one be inadequate before.