Disk Utility and DiskWarrior trouble with external hard-drive.

I got an external hard-drive that doesn't show up on finder. On both Disk Utility and DiskWarrior it keeps mounting and unmounting. Disk Utility when trying to repair, spits this out when it unmounts...
2011-07-28 22:43:43 -0700: Problems were encountered during repair of the partition map
2011-07-28 22:43:43 -0700: Error: Some information was unavailable during an internal lookup.
2011-07-28 22:43:43 -0700: : Some information was unavailable during an internal lookup.
2011-07-28 22:43:43 -0700: [DUDiskController mountDisk] expecting DUDisk, but got nil
On DiskWarrior it simply says 'Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failure (-36,2747)
Earlier today it would stay mounted and Disk Utility would spit out...
Verify and Repair volume “Back-up Hard Drive”
Checking file systemChecking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
Rebuilding catalog B-tree.
Invalid node structure
The volume Back-up Hard Drive could not be repaired.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
while DiskWarrior would try to fix it, but on
Step 5: Locating directory date...
Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 339,474, er make that 340,239, er make that 341,327
and I finally gave up there.
I try to fix the Invalid sibling link error via Terminal and I get this...
imac-2:~ Migrated$ fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk2s2
** /dev/rdisk2s2 (NO WRITE)
Can't open /dev/rdisk2s2: Resource busy
Is there ANY THING I can do to get it to stay mounted and possibly fix this? This is my back-up hard-drive!!

It's the cord that's being used that decides if it shows up, or if it shows up and then goes away over and over. Using a cord where it stays on in the programs, when I run Disk Utility of the darked out part of the hard-drive, it spits out...
Verifying and repairing partition map for “MICRONET”
Checking prerequisites
Checking the partition list
Checking for an EFI system partition
Checking the EFI system partition’s size
Checking the EFI system partition’s file system
Checking all HFS data partition loader spaces
Reviewing boot support loaders
Checking Core Storage Physical Volume partitions
Updating Windows boot.ini files as required
The partition map appears to be OK
while the part of the disk just below it that's light spits out
Verifying volume “Back-up Hard Drive”
Checking file system
Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.
Verify and Repair volume “Back-up Hard Drive”
Starting repair tool:
Checking file system
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Disk Utility stopped repairing “Back-up Hard Drive”: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
while DiskWarrior tries to rebuild it and spits out a memory error.

Similar Messages

In disk utility, it shows that my external hard drive is somehow unmounted and I can't access it in finder or repair it in Disk Utility. How can I get this working without losing my important data?

In disk utility, it shows that my external hard drive is somehow unmounted and I can't access it in finder or repair it in Disk Utility. How can I get this working without losing my important data?
Thank you!

When you erased the disk did you select Mac OS Extended Journaled as the format option?

Trouble with external hard drive and disk repair

So I save my music and photos to an external hard drive. The drive is partitioned to also be the back up for my Time Machine. I live in an old house with the electricity for my MacBook Pro and the external hard drive coming from a wall plug which drapes scrape over when opening and closing, occasionally moving the plugs to the point of cutting off the electricity. Sometimes when that happens, the MacBook Pro won't read the external hard drive and I have to restart the computer for it to read the HD.
Well, this seems to have happened again, only this time it wasn't reading the HD when restarted. I Opened the Disk Utility and did a verify disk, and was told that I couldn't save anything to the drive, but to access the files that were on there. So I attempted to do a disk repair. What happens at that point is instead of getting the solid blue line indicating the repair is happening, I get the barber pole blue line indicating it's trying to access the HD to begin repair. This goes on for hours at a time without the repair taking place.
Can anyone out there give me a "for Dummies" overview of how to get the Disk Utility to repair things?
Thanks.

What I was trying to tell you is that all the music and photos that are on the same drive as your Time Machine backup must also be backed up elsewhere. Unlike all the stuff on your primary (internal) hard drive, those photos and music are not backed up at all unless you have copies of them on a different drive. If your Time Machine hard drive should fail before you do that, they'll all be lost. So copy all the music and photos to your second external hard drive as soon as you are able to do so.
I generally consider the nuisance of backing up extra hard drives to other extra hard drives burdensome and annoying enough so that I always upgrade my primary (internal) hard drive whenever I begin to run short of space on the one I'm using. Now that it's possible to get 750GB and 1TB internal drives for MBPs, I'll get one of those as soon as my present 250GB drive fills up to about 80% of its capacity. I don't want to lug around an external drive in order to have all my stuff with me when I'm away from my home or office — I want it all on my internal drive, and I want to be able to back all of it up at once to an external drive of the same or a larger size. At least until I outgrow a 1TB drive, and I think that will be a while.

Troubles with external hard-drive and iPad

Hi,
First post and all that. Thanks for taking the time to help me out.
I've recently bought my iPad, and while most things work especially well, one issue is really bugging me. The majority of my media is stored on an Iomega 1TB external hard drive, connected via USB to my computer. I'm running Windows XP and iTunes 9.2. When I hook up the iPad to the computer, iTunes loads, starts to sync the iPad with the music from the external HDD and suddenly I get a message saying "the device is not recognised" by the computer. The HDD has dropped off the radar. I've tried different things to get them to talk to each other, but to no avail.
Could someone help me please, to get my precious music off the external HDD? It's bugging me!
Cheers!

Thanks, I'll try connecting the HDD to the front USB ports and the iPad to the back. I did some more digging after posting here (my search-fu is weak!) and found a similar suggestion.
The HDD is indeed independently powered, so I wasn't sure of the power issue, but I'll check it out.
As to more info, the iPod Touch I have doesn't cause the same problems. And I can't transfer the media to the iTunes location, since that's on my first hard drive and I don't have enough space (hence the external one! :oD)
Cheers all!

Rescue and Recovery backup with external hard drive

When I first backed up my computer to my WD 1 tb external hard drive using R&R, boot files were placed on the drive. Recently, some files I had corrupted my external hard drive and I had to fully erase it. Now, after making the drive recognizable again, I went to go back up my computer using rescue and recovery. This time, it asked me whether or not I wanted to make the drive bootable, I said yes, but an error popped up saying I needed 1000 more mb, even though I had 931 gb open. The backup started anyway, but it did not include any boot files. Is there a way to make the drive bootable the next time I backup? What is the difference between nonbootable and bootable? Help? Thanks.

I do NOT have a external Hard drive. If you just zeroed the drive, it is blank. Go into control panel,administrative tools, computer management, disk management. See if you can get a PROPERTIES of the external drive and post a Screen shot of that here. This will show what partition(s) are there, Fat32 vs NTFS. My experience is after you zero a drive, You have to boot your system, then use a Vendor (WD) standalone format utility or windows Disk manangement format, Make partition, etc. The screen shot i need is the one that says: DISK 1 (d 298.09 GB NTFS
Healthy(active,primary partition). This is what my 2nd drive, D, says. 1 partion on the drive.
When i added my second hard drive, it was blank. Booted up, BIOS recognized drive, Then i Formatted it with windows disk managment. I then pointed R&R to take backups to that drive. Create rescue media then made a Master boot record, install standalone R&R boots files, then took the backup. This makes my 2nd drive bootable, should i ever care to boot my D drive up and have R&R standalone program in control. Thus i have 2 bootable drives. C boots into windows, D boots into the rescue and recovery standalone program. I can also boot my C drive into R&R by hitting PF 11 at startup (bios) time.
Which version of r&r you have? Which version of windows? Windows 7 changed the way Master boot records are written.
You can go into R&R, advanced menu, create rescue media. Point to your External drive. WARNING. make sure the do not destroy existing data block is checked. IF YOU ARE brave, uncheck the destroy existing data. This will erase everthing on the drive!!! <<Warning. And be sure NOT to point to any drive you really love.
Buts lets 1st get the screen shot requested to make sure the drive is FORMATTED correcly.

Disk utility won't restore to external hard drive.

I recently installed Leopard on my Imac G5. I tried to "restore" the HD to a USB external hard drive. It said it would take 15 hours and when I came back - the time machine window was up and had a failure message as did the disk utility for the restore. Does the time machine need to be turned off to successfully restore the HD to an external hard drive?

Also worth noting that, if your drive has a FireWire interface, use that instead of USB. While the theoretical max speed of USB2 is faster than FireWire 400, in real-world conditions FW will blow the socks off USB. And if you're purchasing an external drive, it repays on the long run to pay a little more to purchase one with FW. And, of course, if FW400 is faster, FW800 is out of sight.

New Apple User - Trouble with External Hard Drive

I am not very good with computers so hopefully this is a simple task. I just purchased my first mac, a MacBook for college. I bought a Seagate FreeAgent 160 GB drive with the intent of using it for time machine back ups and also for storing my music. I am wondering how or if this is possible.
So far I have:
- Transferred all my music from my PC to the hard drive no problem.
- I tried to set up Time Machine it said I had to delete everything from the Seagate drive in order to use it.
- I then copied all my files off of the hard drive to my Macbook's HD.
- Found out I also need to reformat my Seagate drive to Mac format.
Now I am wondering how to go about all of this and find out if its possible to store my music files on my hard drive as well as use it to for TM. I was thinking I can just move all my music back to the Seagate after TM erases it...would that work or is TM back-ups the only thing you can have on a drive?
Thank you!

Larko,
Generally speaking, you'll need an external hard drive with a capacity that is at least twice the size of the space being used on your internal hard drive. So, if you only have around 30 GBs of data on your new Macbook, you'll need at least 60 GBs for Time Machine. I'm going to state, though, that you'll probably end up using something more like 50 GBs on your Macbook's hard drive, so plan on using around 100 GBs for Time Machine.
Now, what you'll need to do first is format the external drive using Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility). In Disk Utility's "source list" at the left side of the window, select your external drive (not the named "volume" that will appear indented below it), then switch to the "Erase" tab. Erasing the entire hard drive will re-write the partition map, using the Apple "GUID" partition scheme (required for use with Time Machine).
If you want to store additional files on the external, that's OK. However, it is recommended that instead of storing both your Time Machine backup and your "personal" files on the same volume, that you partition the drive with 2 partitions. This will allow you to store the Time Machine backup in isolation on its own volume, and your "personal" files on the second. Disk Utility will handle this, too. Instead of erasing, switch to the "Partition" tab, use the pull-down menu to select 2 partitions, adjust the sizes according to your needs, then click "Partition."
I recommend that you size the first partition (for use with Time Machine) at 100 GBs, and the second with the remainder (which will end up being about 40 GBs).
You can certainly store that 10 GBs of music separately, but wouldn't it be best to import it into iTunes? If you do import it, or if it is kept on your Macbook in some other place, it will be backed up by Time Machine.
Scott

Using Disk Utility Restore function to clone external hard drives

Hi all,
I have a WD 3Tb My Book external hard drive which I want to use as a replacement for an older WD 1Tb My Book external hard drive. I would like to use Disk Utility's built-in Restore function to clone my old external hard drive onto my new external hard drive. Unfortunately, Disk Utility will not allow me to drag the new drive to the "Destination" box; I can drag the old drive to the "Source" box just fine. Why is this? Am I doing something wrong?
It might be important to note that my old external drive is formated to FAT32, whereas the new drive came pre-formatted to NTFS. Do I need to reformat the new drive to FAT32 before dragging the disk to the "Destination" box? In other words, do the source and destination drives need to be the same format in order to use Disk Utility's Restore function?
Thanks very much in advance.

Are these drives being used on Windows machines? If so then you will need to create a new partition from the Partition Scheme dropdown menu after which you can set the scheme to MBR. If the drives are being used only on the Mac then you have to prep the new drive as follows:
Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.
After you copy your files from the old drive to the new one you want to repartition and reformat the old drive in the same way as outlined immediately above.

Trouble with external hard drive. help.

I was formatting my hard drive to allow larger GB files with a lot of trouble so I got my other hard drive which I have previously formatted to find the program that worked. It was formatted with NTFS so I downloaded NTFS 3G and restarted my computer (iMac intel) after trying to format my portable hard drive to ntfs the software didnt work so I uninstalled it. Now my external hard drive will not read on my iMac but it will on my TV and Windows computer. When I installed the software a little error message popped up but i made no changes to the external hard drive and now it wont read on my mac.
The hard drive is a Western Digital My Book 1TB

Did you read this section of the ntfs 3g website? I don't use the program but it may have left pieces of itself on your mac causing your current problems.
You can type the following in a terminal window to see what "non-apple" drivers are still loaded on your system.
kextstat | grep -v com.apple
Post the results if you need to
2.2 Uninstalling Tuxera NTFS for Mac
Tuxera NTFS for Mac can be easily uninstalled using the Uninstall Tuxera NTFS... button in the Tuxera NTFS preference pane, which will be available in System Preferencesonce you have installed the package. See section 4 for a description of the other features in the preference pane.
If this should fail for some reason, an uninstall script exists at the following location:
/System/Library/Filesystems/fusefs_txantfs.fs/Support/uninstall-package.sh

Macbook pro, trouble with external hard drives

I just got the drive on my mid-2010's macbook pro replaced at Apple. I am now experiencing a new problem.
My macbook is having trouble with ALL my external hard-drives. After a few minutes of being plugged in I click on them to open and the finder window is blank. Its not allowing me to veiw the content stored on the drive. If I keep trying my computer will freeze. I try to 'Force Eject' the drive and it doesnt eject so I have to unplug then start over.
This seems to happen roughly about 5 minutes after I plug them in. They work fine the first 5 minutes. Its becoming extremly annoying. All my drives are different makes, sizes, etc.. so I pretty sure its the macbook.
What might the problem be?
Thanks,
Shane

Start with SMC and PRAM resets:
http://support.apple.com/en-us/HT3964
http://web.archive.org/web/20140711222006/http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1379
These are external HDDs that worked prior to the install of the new internal HDD?
Ciao.

Trouble with External Hard Drive

I recorded some saved programs on my Dish Network DVR 622 to an external hard drive that formatted it for that purpose according to their instructions. Can the external hard drive now be reused by being hooked up to my HP notebook computer and reformatted or have I lost it because of that use? If so, how do I do it? I do not want to save anything on the drive--just format it and use it for a different purpose. I no longer have the Dish DVR. When I connect the external drive to my desktop I do not even see an icon for it in My Computer.
Thanks for any help.

OK with a little googling around I discovered the DISH DVR formats its external drives for Linux using the ext file system. Windows cannot natively read ext formatted drives. If you plugged it into a machine running Linux you could read the drive. There is also a Windows program that will allow you to read ext formatted hard drives right from Windows.
http://www.ext2fsd.com/?page_id=16
This may also be kind of a fools errand because I am also seeing that the movies on the hard drive may be encrypted and can only be read by a DVR running your account anyway. If you just want to wipe the drive right click on each of the rectangles in Disk 1 and select delete volume or delete partition until the whole box is blank then create simple volume and format it ntfs and you have a useable external drive.
You could also just delete one of the partitions like say the last one on the right which is 396.26 gb and then create a new partition in it and format it ntfs and give it a drive letter and then you would have a storage space for your laptop files. You could then keep the movies on the rest of the drive for when you get a new DVR. As I understand it from the DISH forums, when you plug the hard drive into a new DVR it will give the option to set it up to work on that DVR. Also I am not 100% clear that the external drives have encrypted movies. That may only apply to people who pull the hard drive out of the DVR and try to get movies from it.
This is an interesting project. The real easy way to see if the movies can be played from a PC is to make a Linux Live disk like ubuntu, boot the system from it and plug in the hard drive while you are running Linux from the Live disk. You could then see if you can see the movies and if they will play in the Linux media player program and it would not cost anything or change anything on your computer. Post back if you want more info on how to try that.

I have an imac running OSX leopard 10.5.4, and a flashing question mark comes up on the screen. I opened disk utility, and in the sidebar my hard drive is not there. I also did the Hardware test supplied with the install CD, and "no problems were found".

note: I have not done the extended hardware test yet.

Can we assumed that the Disk Utility you used was not on your hard disk? If it was on the hard disk you can ignore most of the advice here and we should start again.
I am am a retired Electrical Engineer with many years electronics and IT experience and advise that whilst it is likely that the hard disk has failed and may never work again this may not necessarily be the case.
Do you normally hear or feel the disk running and has this changed?
Have you moved, dropped or hit your Mac while the disk was rotating? - never good for disks.
Even if the disk is not rotating it may not have failed - there could be an imperfect connection, damaged pcb track, a Mac electronics failure such as disk power etc.
The disk could be working mechanically and there could be a break in the data route to or from it etc.
Getting at disks inside some Apple assemblies can be tedious but probably not as bad as you may think - Google for instructions and pictures.
Much may depend upon how important information on a troublesome disk is. Even with a totally dead disk 90% of data can normally be extracted - ocasionally I have been lucky enough to do this at home - a few years back several experts were offering to to this for about 1,000 USD.
Trying the disk in another enclosure was good advice.
You could try gently moving your powered up Mac to see if anything changes.
It is technically possible for a software (unlikely as issue still exists booting from DVD I assume) or firmware issue to cause your symptoms so it might be wise to try every type of reset you can find before going any further. Firmware normally resides within the electronics - it often affects booting and power supplies etc.
Good luck.

My MacBook Pro 13 inch makes a clicking noise from the hard drive and can not start up in safe mode and normal. I then ran disk utility in recovery mode and disk utility shows no problems with the hard drive. What is the problem?

Please help me, I have a mid 2010 Mac book pro with a toshiba mk3266gsxf harddrive. It started making a clicking noise and then my computer crashed. I proceeded to boot in safe mode, but it doesn't work. When I ran disk utility in recovery mode, it showed no problem with my disk. Does any one know what the problem is?

Sounds like a mechanical problem with the drive and it ruined the sectors where the Macintosh HD partition (and OS X, and files and programs) reside, but not your Recovery HD partition.
If you held command option r while booting, that's Internet Recovery and it's loaded via the Internet, not via the Recovery HD partition on the boot drive, so that could mean the drive is dead mechanically or there is another issue.
In either case the drive will likely have to be replaced, it's a matter of what occured to where and the drive state if you can recover data or not. If you made recent backups then your fine.
My computer is not working, is my personal data lost?
Most commonly used backup methods

Disk utility error when erasing an external hard drive

Hi,
Not sure if this is the most appropriate fourm list to post this but I thought I'd give it a try.
I am running snow leopard on my MBP and am trying to use disk utility to erase and format an ext. HD. While the disk icon does not show up on the desktop when I connect it to my mac, Disk utility does show the ext. hd in the left column, but no matter what format I try, even just using one partition and selecting zero out all data, I get the following error: "disk erase failed with the error: POSIX reports: The operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory".
Is the hd dead? Are there other options? I do have disk warrior, version 4.1.1 and it does not regonize the ext. hd.
Please advise.
Thanks,

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I did select the ext hd as the one I wanted to erase (my internal hd is my start up drive). After I selected the ext hd, (there is no volume listed under it so the only thing I can select is the hd itself). that is when I selected erase and then Mac journaled, then named the hd and then after selecting erase, I got the error. Also as a matter of note, if I select firstaid, both the repair and verify permissions are dimmed, so I can't even try to repair the disk. That is when I tried disk warrior hoping that could examine the hd, but since it is not mounted on the d/t, it doesn't show as a drive to check. I don't understand why the ext hd shows up in disk utility, but not the d/t. Also of note is the fact that when I connect that ext had to my Mac with a fw cable, a window opens saying that the drive is not readable and do I want to initialize it or ignore. I choose to initialize and that is when I get the error. Also of note is that I have tried both security options of "don't erase data" and "zero out data" and still get the same error.
Hope this clarifies things a bit.

HAving trouble with external hard drive

Hey
i have a mac mini 1.83ghz intel core duo its about a year old now. I have a trekstore 160gb 2.5 external harddrive and for some reason it wont show up on my computer or the harddrive programm from apple. It worked fine for awhile and i was able to transfer all th data that i want to store on their as a back up and then one day i plug it in and it wont show up. Now this kinda ***** i paid 80 euro for the stupid thing have all m files backed up and its not showing up on my mac.
Any suggestions?
THX

If you've got another Mac around the house or know someone who does, the next step would be to try connecting it to something other than the Mac Mini. If the drive works on another Mac, then there may be something wrong with the Mini; if the drive doesn't work on another Mac, continue being concerned about the integrity of the drive.
Also relevant for 2.5" drives, some of these don't come with AC adapters and instead draw power from the USB or FireWire bus. Though the FireWire bus can supply more than enough power to keep a 2.5" drive spinning, USB power is usually pretty measly, requiring either a complimetary AC adapter or a strange two-headed USB cable to draw extra power.

Disk Utility and DiskWarrior trouble with external hard-drive.

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for