How to Resolve 'journal magic is bad...'in Mac OS X

In Mac OS X Mac file system journaling is a feature that allows recovering from issues like, unexpected power outage. The journal keeps all the vital information that Mac computer requires to get back to a previous working state. Serious consequences can result if journal gets corrupted. For instance, it can make a volume unmountable, while rendering the data inaccessible.

In such situations, presence of a valid backup can do a great job in restoring the lost data and performing Data Recovery Mac. The reason is that you can then safely erase the corrupted volume without fearing of any data loss. HFS Plus is a journaled file system and is thus susceptible to above discussed problems. Below is an error message that can occur in system log of a Mac OS X computer when a HFS Plus volume is corrupted:

jnl: open: journal magic is bad (0x1fd17 != 0x4a4e4c78)

hfs: late jnl init: failed to open/create the journal (retval 0).

hfs(3): Journal replay fail. Writing lastMountVersion as FSK!
jnl: is_clean: journal magic is bad (0x1fd17 != 0x4a4e4c78)

hfs: late journal init: volume on disk3s3 is read-only and journal is dirty. Can not mount volume.

The above messages are logged when you try to mount a corrupted HFS Plus volume. It can occur because of corruption in Journal. Journal corruption usually damage the Mac volume to an extent that it cannot be repaired by Mac OS X built-in utilities. These include the 'Disk Utility' and its command-line utility- fsck. So you must adopt some other methods of Mac Data Recovery.

Use these methods to recover from such issues:

You can try resolving the given problem by disabling journaling and then re-enabling it again

If you have a backup from which full data recovery is possible, erase the corrupted volume and restore

In cases when these two methods do not work, it is suggested to use a Mac Recovery utility to scan, locate, and recover the lost data. These are easily available products with competency to restore lost or deleted information from Mac disks. Due to their interactive nature, these programs can even be operated by a novice. Macintosh Data Recovery guarantees complete data retrieval from Mac disks formatted to HFS, HFSX, HFS Plus, HFS Wrapper and FAT file systems.

This Mac Data Recovery software supports Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.5 Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, and 10.3.9 Panther. With advanced features and simple interface, the software is one among the professional choices.