A big shout out to Apple's Disk Utility

Anyone who has seen my last two threads on disk problems and Disk Warrior -
here -
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2494488&tstart=0
and here-
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2497398&tstart=0
knows I'm becoming a big fan of DW.
But alas, there was one drive - on my 2002 iMac G4 "Lamp Screen" whose directory DW couldn't replace. So, I'm letting that drive slowly (or more quickly) fade. But that drive in the meantime has been running in a seemingly normal fashion and the computer it seems, has been operating at normal speeds.
Until Yesterday.
Huge thunderstorms here where I live, twice (very temporarily) knocked out power - only for a few seconds each time. My iMac shut down during the first one. I tried four times to bring her back to life but got only the endless blank blue screen. I thought her drive was finally gone for good. (I already had everything backed up days ago from the preview pane of DW!!) So ....
I started thinking about strategies for installing the system on one of my external drives and booting from there or buying a new drive on which to install the system. But, since the CD / DVD drive on my Macbook is dead I would be needing to utilize the CD /DVD drive on the iMac itself. So I did a firmware boot by holding command-option-O-F at the startup sound and got the white screen. I typed eject-cd / return at the prompt to open the CD tray and put in the install DVD. Then I simply pushed shut the tray and typed shut-down / return at the prompt for shut down. Then I booted from the install disk.
After the computer started up from the disk it occurred to me to go ahead and give Disk Utility another try. I'M GLAD I DID!! It turns out that during the "verify" phase of disk repair the report spat out a new error message besides the "keys out of order" (un-fixable, even by DW since the disk has mechanical problems.) The new error was "invalid volume header." After disk repair finished I immediately ran it a second time to see if the volume header at least was fixed. It did not come up in the report. So I went ahead and rebooted from the iMac drive.
IT'S ALIVE!!! Well, at least for the time being but still ....
A big shout out to Disk Utility!
Message was edited by: riverside
Message was edited by: riverside

BD,
Can you think of any substantial disadvantages to installing my system on an external drive for the iMac as opposed buying a replacement internal drive ... I mean, I can daisy chain external FW drives so the only advantage I can see is just a small amount of extra external clutter .... ?

Similar Messages

SMART: DiskWarrior disagrees with Apple's Disk Utility and TechTool Pro

DiskWarrior 4 is giving me SMART status warnings for my internal drive, specifically that the temperature is too hot, and may indicate an impending failure. This typically happens when my drive is rather busy, like doing a long backup.
However, both Apple's Disk Utility and TechTool Pro 5 say the drive is fine; Disk Utility says the "S.M.A.R.T. status: verified" and TTP does it's check of the SMART status, with result "Passed."
Who do I believe?
Thanks.

That is hot, it sounds like you have a cooling problem!
Most drive manufactures only recommend an operating temperature of 140 F (60 C), here are the Spec's for the 320 GB WD Caviar Blue that I installed in my Early Core Duo just a few months ago as an example: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=299
What does iStat Pro say your fan speed(s) are?
You need to check or have your fan unit checked out to be sure the fans clean and working properly?
http://www.powermax.com/articles/2006/08/mac-pro-taken-apart/

Greyed Out "Free Space" in Disk Utility

Hi
I have a problem with my main Logical Volume Group / Partition. So My main Logical Volume Group (Macintosh HD) was separated into 2 partitions. I decided to delete the second one, and once the process started in Disk Utility, it crashed. Now if I look at the Logical Volume Group, it is separated in two, first one being Macintosh HD, and the second one is greyed out and is "Free Space".
Now If I look at the info of my Logical Volume Groupe, it says "Capacity 853,07 GB / Available 115 KB" when in actuality I have a 1TB fusion Drive, If I look at the Macintosh HD PARTITION, it says "Capacity 844,56GB / Available 252.99GB" which evidently doesn't add up. The "Free Space" is supposedly 267,78GB...
I tried "filling" that free space with a new partition, but when I apply the changes to the partition layout, nothing happens, and it reverts back to being greyed out and empty. (I tried both in Disk Utility, and in Disk Utility while in Recovery Mode, and I've also Repaired the volume and the partition)
How can I either force-create a partition with that free space, so that I can use all of my actual HDD space, or completely erase that "Free Space" and have my Macintosh HD partition fill the whole Logical Volume Group. (I tried erasing the free space of the Macintosh HD volume, but it didn't change anything.
Hopefully, there is a way to do it without having to back up my whole Macintosh HD partition, and reformatting my whole computer...
Thanks

If you wish to delete data, the best option would be to encrypt everything on the drive (locking everything with a password) and then erasing the drive. This would atleast scramble the left over data. The problem is that SSDs have a wear controlling firmware that distribute the load accordingly, so the entire drive wears evenly. Secure erase wouldnt work since secure erase works by first erasing the refrences to the data, and then writing 0s over the left over data. Since the firmware distributes the load differently each time, there is no guarantee that the data would be covered in 0s.

Powerbook won't boot past apple screen, disk utility can't repair

Last night I applied the most recent software updates, I don't remember exactly what they were but there was a Java update, a security update, a quicktime update and an itunes update. after the required restart, my powerbook g4 won't boot past the apple icon screen.
I can't boot it into safe mode or single user mode.
I can start it up in target disk mode and transfer a handful of files/directories at a time before it hangs.
When I try to run the repair in Disk Utility against the target disk, it gets about halfway before the following:
Verify and Repair disk “Macintosh HD”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
Volume check failed.
Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error
the disk doesn't make any grinding or anything, just a few clicks when it tries to boot but nothing bad sounding.
Is my computer hosed? Is it worth bringing it to the genius bar?

Hi, Pat. How much time did you give DW to complete its work? Locating the data it needs to rebuild your directory can take a while — that's the step at which DW far outperforms other utilities. It digs deeper and tries harder than anything else, and that can take a long time. The longest successful DW "fix" I've seen reported here in the seven and a half years I've been participating in Apple Discussions was *14 days* of continuous work to find the necessary data and reconstruct a hard drive directory from it. That was after all other disk utilities had been tried and had failed; it was the user's last hope to save data that hadn't been backed up anywhere. If you haven't allowed DW at least a few hours to accomplish its task, give it another chance. And don't try to use the computer for anything at all while DW is working.

Does the "Zero Out Data" feature in Disk Utility map out bad sectors/blocks?

I would like a definite answer on this one. I have heard that is does and that it doesn't.

Yes it does.
The way it works is this, your drive normally tries to write to sectors and if it can't write to one or more, then it writes someplace else and maps the bad sectors off in the driver software.
That's how it's supposed to work.
What I believe what happens is drives are made, but not checked for bad sectors at the factory as this is a considerable time consuming process.
So when a computer comes down the line, it's hard drive is just injected factory style the data it needs right on the drive, over bad sectors and everything.
Now it could be that, and or it could be the result of time and the drive sitting and being shipped. Normally the heads are locked.
Whatever, if you move a drive while the heads are over the platters, they can strike the platters and cause data loss from bad sectors. So it's important not to move or jar the computer while the hard drive is spinning, why Mac's have Sudden Motion Sensors built in.
So, if data is laid over bad sectors, or one has possibly damaged their drive slightly and the data on it, could result in glitchy or unexplained behavior.
Large files like video that take much space on the drive are more likely to encounter bad sectors and thus become incomplete when read later.
What the Disk Utility > Erase with Zero option does, is it tries to write 0's to EVERY BIT on the drive. A sector is made up of bits, 1's and 0's so this method ensures every bit is checked if it can be written too or not.
If a sector fails, then it's mapped off, never to be written too again.
When one places their data on the drive after a Zero, it's on 100% reliable bits and sectors. Thus there is less chance of file corruption when it's read later.
A video production guy told me this little trick as they have huge files so thus needed very reliable data retention and recovery.
I've been using this technique with all new drives for decades now and it's worked for me, unless I forget to do it.
Like anything, others may not require perfection. Regular users with small files all the time likely will lose a file here and there and go about living with it.
Big files are a different story obviously. So optional, not mandatory.
If your confident you can reinstall your operating system, then that's one thing, but if your not, then don't bother.

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Disk Utility Does not recognize Seagate 3T USB Drive

I recently purchased a Seagate 3T SATA drive and installed it in an external enclosure with a USB connection. The drive appear to spin up but Disk Utility under OS 10.9.4. Am I missing something or are drives this big not supported by Apple's Disk Utility in Mavericks?

Call Seagate help - as you may have run a reconfiguration for Mac.
Or - it could be a firmware issue.
Anyway if you are in the return period and can't get it working - return it.

Disk Utility: Differences between "Zero Out Data" and "7-Pass Erase"?

I'm wondering if anyone knows if there's a significant difference between the "Zero Out Data" erase option in Disk Utility (specifically Disk Utility 10.5.5), and the "7-Pass Erase" and "35-Pass Erase" options in same software.
Here's why I'm asking: I have a co-worker with an iMac G5 20" 1.8GHz with 160GB internal hard drive. As a result of the power supply overheating a week ago due to dust, some hard drive problems resulted. I'm trying to assess whether these are 'soft' formatting problems that can be recovered from, or 'hard' problems requiring replacement of the hard drive and/or power supply.
Following the failure, I removed the dust and restored the iMac to servicable form. The power supply seems to be OK now. The next thing was to attempt to recover as much data as possible from the 160GB, as the last full backup was a week old. Carbon Copy Cloner, shell copy via 'sudo cp -p -R -v', Finder copy, and DiskWarrior recovery all met with problems. TechTool Pro identified a huge swatch of unreadable sectors during repeated surface scans. Unfortunately, these unreadable sectors were located midway in the OSX boot partition (an 80GB partition), and not in the other 80GB partition devoted to lower priority video data.
When I was satisfied I had backed up the data to the best of my abilities, I next set out to reformat the drive and see if the bad sectors could be eliminated or remapped out of existence. I did a "Zero Out Data" erasure in Disk Utility (with no errors during the erase), but TechTool Pro showed the bad sectors persisted in equal strength at the same location. I next executed a sixteen hour "7-Pass Erase" (again no errors, and confirming that it takes about an hour per 10GB). The next day when I ran TechTool pro, all of the sector errors had disappeared. I'm a bit perplexed as to why the "7-Pass Erase" seems to have recovered the use of the drive. Is it possible that there are simply thousands of bad sectors now remapped that I'm not seeing? [If so, how do I check for this?] TechTool Pro has not reported any S.M.A.R.T. issues to date on the drive. What am I to make of that?
There are some related threads I've checked into, but I'm not sure how to properly assess my situation based on this information:
<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=232007>
<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=138559>
<http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=118455>
Since the iMac has three weeks left on it's one year warranty, and I've already moved the user to another machine temporarily, I'm thinking that the smart thing to so is to send it in to Apple to have them look at the power supply and hard drive. That way, when it returns, even if there is still a lingering hardware problem, at least it will be covered under warranty for another 90 days.
Any thoughts?
iMac G5 20" 1.8GHz Mac OS X (10.4.6) 1.25GB RAM, 160GB hard disk, SuperDrive

HI, Bret.
The only differences between "Zero Out Data", "7-Pass Erase", and "35-Pass Erase" are the number of times a binary zero is written to every bit on the disk. "Zero Out Data" writes a binary zero once, whereas the 7- and 35-Pass options write a zero seven and 35 times, respectively.
Technically, one pass with Zero Out Data should be sufficient to map bad sectors out of service, a process also known as sparing. If a bad sector is encountered, it is both marked as "in use" in the directory's allocation table and added to the directory's "bad blocks file."
My understanding is that the Surface Scan of Tech Tool Pro should identify bad sectors every time it is run unless the bad sectors have been locked out by the drive controller of the ATA drive itself. This is because Surface Scan checks the entire surface of the disk.
What may have happened is that running "Zero Out Data" spared the bad blocks from a directory standpoint, but did not result in the drive's controller locking out those sectors for reasons detailed in the "Surface Scan" section of the Tech Tool Pro manual. However, the 7-Pass Erase may have resulted in the drive's controller locking out the bad sectors and why Surface Scan did not pick them up after such.
Given the problems you described, I concur with your plan to have Apple check the affected computer. You might also want to consider purchasing an AppleCare Protection Plan for that Mac: I recommend and buy these for all my Macs.
For some additional information on bad sectors, see the "Bad Sectors" section of my "Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption" FAQ.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Apple Disk Utility message

Hi all,
I opened Apple's Disk Utility, chose "Macintosh HD," and clicked "Verify Disk." No more than 1 minute into the Verify, I got a message (in red) in the Show Details output box saying "Incorrect number of file hard links."
Before I boot from the OS X Recovery HD (command-r) and try to fix it with Apple's Disk Utility, I was wondering if anyone had any insight about the message I got. My HD is not experiencing any problems.
MacBookPro8,3. OS X 10.8.3.

Thanks birmingham for responding to my post. I think the problem i encountered is more common than i at first thought, so i'm gonna sum up what i learned.
Sometimes, when upgrading the OS a full dot point -- 10.7. to 10.8. for example -- via Mac Application Store, the User will get an error saying, " Incorrect number of file hard links" when running apple's Disk Utility. The error is an "inode" error -- look it up at wikipedia. The solution is simple enough: Don't freak out and run apple's Disk Utility from the Recovery HD (command-r). Don't use DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, TechTool Pro, or anything other than apple's Disk Utility. Also no need to reinstall the OS or anything like that.
hope this helps someone in the future,
jim
she's from birmingham, way down in alabam. whoa black betty. BAM-BA-LAM.

Disk Utility's "Erase Free Space" screwed me over big time. Help Please.

Hey, I have a serious dillema. I free'd up disk space on my mac by transfering files to an external drive, and then used Disk Utility to erase unused disk space to do a thorough cleaning. Now it seems that out of thin air, Disk Utility said my Mac is out of disk space....it basically filled up my hard drive with 370GB's of god knows what.
Here's exactly what I did, step by step:
Basically, I wanted to clean up my hard drive a bit, as I was using about 500GB's out of my 750GB HD (on my MBP 10.6.8)
-Before I did this test, I did a verify + repair disk permissions, I also organized my computer's files... and just to be safe, I booted up from the D key so I could do an extended hardware test to see if everything was running smoothly. I then zapped the PRam. This was my pre-clean maintenence check.
-Then I transferred all of my files onto my external disk.
-After this was done, I dumped the files (that I used to transfer to my External) into the trash bin.
-I emptied the trash bin.
-Now I free'd up hundreds of GB's of space.
-It said that I had 376 GB's of free space in my hard drive. Yay.
Now here where it all went wrong:
-I heard that if you go into Disk Utility, and click on "Erase Free Space" that it goes over all the delted files (that aren't actually permanently deleted) and it permanently deletes them so that it frees up all the loose ends on your mac. I didn't want any ghost files, or any old installs or whatever...so I thought, yes.
Now...Disk Utility was doing this for me....and 2 hours later....it said that I was out of disk space. Disk Utility froze around the 90% completion-mark when it was "Creating Volume" (or something like that) and I had to quit Disk Utility.
Then, I exited....went onto my desk top and checked my Hard Drive.
It said that I had ZERO KB's available.
My hard disk was completely full. How is this even possible? I had 376 GB's of EMPTY space 2 hours earlier.
I tried to go into all of my files to see if there were any duplicates made..I checked terminal to see what went wrong, I checked console...I searched, and I searched...and nothing.
What. The. Heck.
Can someone please, please help me?

Boot from your installation disc, erase the internal drive in Disk Utility, reinstall OS X, copy the files from your backup, and then run Software Update.

Disk Utility doesn't run from installation dvd.....

hi there:)
i ran a scheduled maintenance check using Onyx. It turned out that the disk could not be verified and it had to be fixed by inserting the installation dvd and running 'disk utility'. i inserted the dvd and ran the 'disk utility', however, it quit unexpectedly. the following message came up:
Process: Disk Utility [417]
Path: /Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility
Identifier: com.apple.DiskUtility
Version: 10.5.8 (198.16)
Build Info: DiskUtility-1981600~17
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [172]
Date/Time: 2008-12-28 12:28:49.499 +0000
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.6 (9G55)
Report Version: 6
Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0
Dyld Error Message:
Symbol not found: __commpagedsmos
Referenced from: /Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility
Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
i really want to know what to do to save my mac book!
please help
regards,
rik

Rik,
Please reread my first post carefully & make sure you follow its instructions closely. The "Repair Disk" step (not the verify one) should be run while your Mac is started up from the install disk, then the "Repair Permissions" step should be run after you have restarted normally.
Some background info that may be helpful:
Disk Utility (& all such disk utilities) must temporarily "unmount" a disk to affect a repair of its file system (which is what the "Repair Disk" step does). Unmounting a disk makes it unavailable for normal use. The disk containing the operating system that is currently running the computer (the startup disk) cannot be unmounted. This is why the "Repair Disk" button is grayed out if you run Disk Utility with your startup disk as its target.
Repairing permissions does not require unmounting the disk but it does require a healthy file system, which is why the disk repair must precede it. Apple recommends repairing permissions on the start up disk while booted from it, which is why it should be done after restarting normally.
The verify steps do not actually repair anything. They just run the checks that the repair steps run to determine if any repairs are needed & report the results of those checks.
The routine that repairs permissions is part of the OS itself. Disk Utility, Onyx, & all other such utilities that repair permissions actually just tell the OS to perform this routine. Thus, it doesn't matter which one you use to do this repair, nor is one utility any better than another at doing this. So if you prefer, after restarting after doing the disk repair from the install disk you can do the permissions repair with Onyx.

Update to 1.2.3 bricked 60 GB iPod video - strange things in disk utility

In brief - my wife hadn't updated her iPod in quite a while. It's been pulling nursery duty for the past year. She wanted to switch out some music, so she connected the iPod to her laptop (Powerbook running OS X.4.9).
We updated to the latest iTunes. Were prompted to update the iPod to firmware 1.2.3, then the trouble began. Update ran, files started to transfer, then everything locked up at about 2GB of music moved.
Went through the 5R's. Got in to the restore loop that so many other 1.2.3 users have found themselves in.
Decided to poke around in the file system and also to try a disk erase.
Disk Utility is showing the iPod as a 2TB drive (yes, it thinks it is two terabytes!) No option in Disk Utility will work. Tried to partition (thought it would re-write the partition table). The attempt fails with the following:
[task] failed with the error:
Input/Output error.
Now here is where it get's trippy. opened up a Terminal window and ran through some command line steps -
disktool -l reports a drive as disk 2
*Disk Appeared ('disk2',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
pdisk /dev/disk2 yields this
Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on '/dev/disk2'
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Applepartitionmap partition map 62 @ 1
2: Apple_MDFW firmware 196608 @ 63 ( 96.0M)
3: Apple_HFS disk 117013560 @ 196672 ( 55.8G)
Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=117210240 (55.9G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
So the file system appears to be there, but is totally munged up in such a way that all of the GUI tools are not able to access it.
Tried to zero-out the drive using disk utility (one site suggested this had worked for a bricked iPod) but it didn't work. Now the pdisk doesn't even report a partition map to work with. Things keep going from bad to worse... and I started at terrible.
Does anyone have any pointers on what to do next to get a this thing working? Or is it time to invoke my wife's applecare?
Thanks in advance, bill

Hi, I have the Logic3 Universal Dock, using S-Video and stereo line out for Photos and Videos with sound to my TV, which works well.
BUT NO MUSIC when I want to play just music through the TV! Is this a software issue? You say you used to be able to hear music through your TV. Apple please help here! Thanks.

Best disk utility?

I have been reading about disk utilities and Disk Warrior keeps coming up, but also Drive Genius which seems to have more features.
Can anyone please comment on which disk utility might be the best choice?
Thanks a lot for any advice.

Hi
I might just have been very lucky indeed but in over twenty years of using Macs I've never needed to use a third party disc utility.
When I used the classic OS I had the Norton Utilities suite but I never needed to use it to actually cure any problems.
In the last year I did need to use Apple's own Disk Utility to cure a problem created when installing Adobe's CS2 suite, however Apple's Disk Utility sorted everything out fine.
I do think that backing up your stuff is very important and I do this every day. I use external hard-drives and some online server space.
If some terrible software fault caused problems on my computer I'd just erase the hard-drive and re-install.

Disk Utility not starting 10.4.6

Disk Utility[498] Unable to load nib file: DUApp.nib, exiting
This is the console message.
Thanks

Hi, Charles. Welcome to the Discussions.
NIB files are associated with an application's graphical user interface.
Two possibilities here:
1. You have a corrupted disk directory and the file has "gone missing" as a result. Run steps 1 and 2 of the procedure outlined in my "Resolving Disk, Permission, and Cache Corruption" FAQ. Be sure to write down any errors found in Step 2.
2. If that does sort it out, you can reinstall Disk Utility.app from your Tiger Install Disks (or Disk 1 of the Software Restore and Install disks that came with your computer if your Mac shipped with Tiger installed) using the shareware application Pacifist. Pacifist has excellent usage instructions, so you should have no problems with it. Then reapply the 10.4.6 Combo Update to pick up any changes to Disk Utility since it shipped on the discs from which you reinstalled it.
3. If you're uncomfortable with the Pacifist approach, then you can perform a full reinstall of Mac OS X using the Archive and Install approach. See my "General advice on performing an Archive and Install" FAQ. Perform the steps therein in the specified order.
Good luck!
Dr. Smoke
Author: Troubleshooting Mac® OS X
Note: The information provided in the link(s) above is freely available. However, because I own The X Lab™, a commercial Web site to which some of these links point, the Apple Discussions Terms of Use require I include the following disclosure statement with this post:
I may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

Can Disk Utility make a "New Image" from a desktop copy of a DVD?

I have not been able to get Disk Utility to make "new images" of a couple of DVDs. For one of the DVDs, it may have something to do with a hyphen in the title. I haven't a clue why I'm failing with the second of the two DVDs. (Previously, I've had no trouble with about a dozen DVDs so far.)
Several members of this discussion group recommended me to copy&paste or drag&drop the files from a DVD to a new folder (say on the desktop), and then to drag the resulting new folder into the box in Disk Utility, and then to make a disk image using Disk Utility.
(Note: While I believe the original DVDs are not encrypted, I ran an experiment to make double sure, by using MacTheRipper first to produce folders containing clean files.)
However, when I drag the new folder into the box in Disk Utility, and let go of the mouse button, then the folder does not stay in Disk Utility window, but instead springs back to the desktop.
How can I get Disk Utility to make new images from the new desktop folders?
Note:
As a partially successsful work around:
For one of the two original DVDs - which has only about 3.7GB on it - I can sometimes (only sometimes) succeed in doing without Disk Utility simply by dragging the audio and video files from the new desktop folder onto a blank DVD, and then burning that DVD. However, in an average of about two out of every three attempts so far, my Mac rejects the new disk as unusable during the burn process.
For the other original DVD - which has about 4.36GB on it - the contents of the new desktop folder won't fit onto a blank DVD. It then gets messy - shrinking the files - so I'd like to avoid all of that by getting DIsk Utility to work properly.

For the answer, see the following excerpt from my own posting dated 2 May 2006, i.e.:
"I finally found out for myself (from Disk Utility Help) that to make a new image from a file/folder, rather than dragging the folder to the Disk Utility pane, in the top menu bar in Disk Utility you select Images/New/Image from Folder."

A big shout out to Apple's Disk Utility

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