Disk Utility fails to partition

This is what it says:
Partition failed with the error:
Could not modify partition map because filesystem verification failed

Run disk utility on your hard drive to repair it also repair permissions, then give it a try.

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Disk utility fails to partition - restarting the compuyter is required

I would appreciate your help-I have tried to find a topic with the same problem but could not.
I want to partition my hard drive in order to have a second partition for time machine. I get an error message, saying that I have to press the power button for three seconds etc to restart the machine. And of course when I come back there is no partition.
So, now I try with the installation disk, and use the disk utility, I repair and verify the hard drive, and I try to partition it. After about 10 minutes, I get the same error message, having again to restart the MacBook. So, what´s wrong?
Any suggestions would be highly appreciated.
Thanks

Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel Macs) then click on the OK button. Set the number of partitions from the dropdown menu. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Partition button and wait until the volume(s) mount on the Desktop.
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.
Steps 4-6 are optional but should be used on a drive that has never been formatted before, if the format type is not Mac OS Extended, if the partition scheme has been changed, or if a different operating system (not OS X) has been installed on the drive.

Disk Utility Fails When Partitioning FireWire Drive

I am getting this error when attempting to partition my FireWire drive.
"Disk utility has lost its connection with the Disk Management Tool and cannot continue. Please quit and relaunch Disk Utility."
I know that Panther users have been having this same error pop up when they attempt to repair permissions. Something about the iTunes 6.0.2 update. I attempted to remove the package files, which was the fix for that issue, and then partition the drive, but it didn't help. This is a different issue. I can repair permissions fine, as well.
Booting from the Mac OS X Tiger install DVD, and using Disk Utility from there, works just fine. I want Disk Utility to work from the startup volume, however.
Has anyone else experienced this issue?
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can correct it?
Thanks!

10.4.6 Combo Update has fixed the issue.
Thanks so much! I'm glad you happened to be awake and reading this board. I think something strange happened with the 10.4.6 update in the first place, because my Dock is always restored to the default look (I customize it with TransparentDock) every time Apple updates the OS. Also (maybe I shouldn't say this on an Apple board), my iBook is running Front Row, and it wasn't broken after the update, but it is now, which is fine, as long as Disk Utility works.
Thanks again for your help!

My Macintosh HD partition is damaged and the disk utility failed to repair it

I cannot boot anymore after I tried to repair the disk with Disk Utility after my Mac became very slow.
This is the second time it happened to me in a week with the same symptoms. When I try to boot, I see a gray screen and the computer just stops
When I use the recovery partition, the disk utility fails to repair the disk, stopping after failing to fix the catalog file.
I started to use TM to backup my data after erasing the disk and reinstalling Mountain Lion but I wonder if my hard drive is damaged because the same problem happened twice. (Thanks TM for keeping my data safe this time)
Any advice or ways to fix that once and for all ?
PS : The worst is that i can still boot with Bootcamp to Windows, not very useful though

rpignard wrote:
Any advice or ways to fix that once and for all ?
Since your Recovery HD and Windows partition work fine, the problem is located in your Macintosh HD partition and I very highly suspect it's bad/failing sectors that's to blame for your troubles.
This can sometimes occur if the computer was moved while the hard drive was in operation, else sectors fail all by themselves, or if the drive is having mechanical issues, which you problem will continue no matter what you do.
This time when you use Recovery > Disk Utility to erase the Macintosh HD partition, use the middle secure erase option, not the far left or right options (the right will work also just take a really long time)
What your doing is with the middle secure erase option is called a "Zero" write, which Disk Utility will write 0's over all the bits in that partition. When it's done it will read it back for confirmation and when it does so, any bits that are failing will be mapped off by the drive. Hopefully this will resolve the issue without needing a drive replacement.
Once that is completed, reinstall OS X from Recovery, any programs from original sources, files only from backup and your problems hopefully should disappear.
What happens is if your data gets corrupted on the boot drive by failing sectors, it gets transfered to TimeMachine (or to bootable clones) and when you restore your right back to square one. So it's important to rule out that possibility with original installs of OS X and third party programs.
If your problems continue, then it's possibly a problem with third party at boot kernel extension files, (and the catalog problem was yet another one) so to solve this you need to make sure all your third party software is updated and works with your current OS X version.
A trick is, if you get gray screen at boot time, is to hold the Shift Key while booting the computer, this will disable a lot of things and allow you to fix the third party software issue.
What I suggest you do is have multiple backup systems, including hold option key bootable clones, this way if your TM drive gets corrupted you can go back in time to a saved state on the clone, restore that and then your files from the TM drive.
Most commonly used backup methods

Disk Utility: Backup to partition on external drive?

Hi people. Would be glad of an answer and any comments on this.
I have 3 Macs at home, a new G5 dual core and 2 G4 imacs, networked wirelessly. At this point I only backup my G5 to a second internal HD, by using Disk Utility's 'Restore' function.
My preferred plan is to get an external Firewire 400 drive, make 3 partitions on it, and do the Disk Utility 'Restore' for the 3 respective Macs. That way it's not only a backup, but a bootable solution if one of the machines dies.
My second choice is to add one of those generic network hard drives to the router and try to back up to that(essentially as an FTP/Samba disk), but it would be slow and not bootable at all.
Question: Will disk utility allow a partition, either on a firewire drive or network drive, to be the destination for a 'restore'? Or will it only recognise whole volumes?

Hi, Daniel.
You wrote: "Question: Will disk utility allow a partition, either on a firewire drive or network drive, to be the destination for a 'restore'? Or will it only recognise whole volumes? "Disk Utility will recognize a volume (partition) on a FireWire drive as the destination for a Restore.
Using the Restore function for backup is quite time-consuming as it has to backup everything every time you perform a backup. You will get much faster results by using a proper Backup and Recovery solution that supports incremental backups, i.e. backing up just the changes from the source to the destination (backup) so that the two are synchronized. For advice on the backup and recovery solution I employ, see my "Backup and Recovery" FAQ.
People have had mixed results using NAS (Network-attached Storage) for backups. I frankly think that it's still a bit early to try that route. Using an external FireWire drive has always given be good results.
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.

If leopard won't boot from dvd, use disk utility mount to partition

wanted to share a way that i successfully installed os 9, tiger, and leopard on 1 hard drive. first of all, leopard was the only installation that i had difficulty with. it would not boot off the original dvd, no matter if i held down the 'c' key or the option key, so this is what i did after a lot of reading on the internet to try and troubleshoot this issue.
First thing i did was partition my internal hard drive in 3 partitions using disk utility. the 3rd partition was around 9gb. I installed os9 first on the 1st partition, i then installed tiger on that same partition. then i put in my leopard dvd, and opened up disk utility. and clicked on "restore", and dragged the dvd image as the "source", and chose the 9gb partition as the destination, and clicked on restore. then, i changed the "startup disk" to start from the 9gb where i just restored the image, and rebooted, and went through the leopard setup and chose the 2nd partition as the place to install. this should work with the dvd, or if you made an image from the dvd. I hope this helps someone else whose dvd won't boot, because it was very frustrating after you purchase a faster processor, and faster video card so that your system meets the requirements, and then the dvd won't boot.

Two ways. Use another computer to restore the install disc to one of those ext HD. Then, use it to boot the other machine. Get an ext CD/DVD reader and use it to read the install disc and boot the machine. However, if both the HD and optical reader are kaput, then a trip to an Apple repair station is in order.

Keys out of order, disk utility fails

PowerPC (?, whatever came just before Intel-based machines) iMac running 10.3.something failed to boot - hangs at "Logging into OSX" window but never gets there to log in. Booting from Install CR-ROM and running Disk Utility fails to repair Catalog. Booting in single user mode results in "Keys out of order (4, 51882)" "The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired". Also tried to boot from Prosoft "Data Rescue II" CD-ROM but no help
Any suggestions to repair/recover?
Files all appear to be there - can navigate around in Unix and list them. Also have external Lacie hard drives connected (unconnecting does not resolve problem) - Would there be a way to cp or rcp some key files to these external drives to at least recover some?

Welcome To  Discussions jeff_st!
If all else fails, and you have access to another Firewire enabled Mac, you can also use Firewire Target Disk Mode, to backup as much data as possible.
Then reformat the HD, zeroing all data, and perform an Erase & Install.
ali b

Disk utility gives "Error: Partition map repair failed while adjusting structures to fit current whole disk size"

I am getting the following error when running Disk Utility (under ML) on an exteral USB hard drive:
Error: Partition map repair failed while adjusting structures to fit current whole disk size.
I get thsi when I ask Disk Utility to "Repair Disk" at the top level of the disk hierarchy (i.e. not on one of the partitions within the disk but on the disk itself). I was not getting this error with Lion on the same disk before I upgraded from Lion to ML.
It seems like a bug in ML. I found websites where they suggest that you just run Lion's Disk Utility and it will show the disk to be fine.
Any thoughts?

So, I finally seemed to have resolved things with the Seagate 4TB Firewire external drive. If you Google about, you will find a thread on Seagate's own support forum that describes how to disable the sleep function on the drive. You CANNOT ALLOW THE DRIVE TO SLEEP WHILE CONNECTED TO YOUR MAC.
After a lot of reading, here's what I think is happening: the drive goes to sleep, after some period of inactivity, and when you shutdown your Mac, OS X tries to write something to the drive as part of the dismount / disconnect / shutdown process. That fails in some manner, leaving the drive 'corrupted' at the filesystem or partition level.
Then, on the next boot-up, Mountain Lion tells you that it cannot repair the drive and it mounts as read only. Your only fix at that point is to re-partition / re-format and start over (which is big fun with 3TB of data to copy back on to the drive).
If you prevent the drive from sleeping, whenever it's connected to the MacBook, then the above process doesn't occur and voila, the drive just works. So far, I haven't had any problems with about a week of starting / shutting down my MacBook connected to the offending drive (translation: I was going to return the drive, but the problem is clearly with Mac OS X Mountain Lion).

Disk utility fails to resize portable drive partitions with error message "requested change in size is too small".

I am using a 1TB WD studio passport portable drive with my 2011 MacBook Pro. I have the portable drive partitioned into 4 volumes: 355 GB, 320 GB, 320 GB, & 4 GB. But Disk Utility won't allow me to split the third of those into 160 GB /160 GB. All volumes verify as seeming "to be okay". Seems if Disk Utility could create me a 4GB partition that 160 GB is plenty big enough, right? Something's not right; Can you help me with this please?

What is on those partitions and or the partition you want to split in two?
If you don't have any data on partitions or if you can save it someplace else for the time being then why not just Re-Partition the whole drive into the sizes you now want.

Help! Disk Utility failed to restore my 750gb Mac HD

Here's the story. A couple weeks ago I successfully installed Windows 7 Home as a bootcamp partition using Disk Utility, not Bootcamp Assisstant, I clicked on my 750gb mac drive, clicked on partition, clicked the "+" symbol to split the HDD into a second partition, allocated 200gb for this Windows 7 partition remaining 550gb for Mac HD, made it into MS-Dos Format so I can format it into NTSF during the Windows installation; everything was working fine, I even was successfully running Parallels 7 with it.
So here's my problem, the other day I purchased Windows 7 Professional, decided I wanted to do a complete new installation so I went into my Mac OS X Lion and went into Disk Utility, deleted the Windows partition, then dragged the corner of my Mac HD putting it back to 750gb. Now my bootcamp partition of Windows 7 HD is deleted so I went ahead and hit the "+" to create a partition for Windows 7 Pro HD, it gave me a Failed Error message, so I went into my Mac OS HD and repaired Disk, even hit the set permissions button), those both didnt fix my problem of creating a partition.
So i go into bootcamp assistant and went through the process, i already have the mac drives, hit continue, then it showed me what i can allocate for Windows. It tells me I only have 345gb to allocate a Windows partition, but I should have 200gb ontop of that. My total HDD is 750gb and I only have 550gb available for me to use :(. How do I get the remaining 200gb i used from my old windows partiton I already deleted. By the way, I already allocated 750gb to my Mac HDD freeing up all the free space.
Can anyone help? I can send screenshots if needed.
Thank you!

Carbon Copy Cloner your Lion partition to a HFS+ Journaled formatted external powered drive, "hold option boot" from it, check it out and then use Disk Utility there to erase the entire drive and reformat, reverse clone.
You'll loose the Lion Recovery Partition, but you got clones on external drives.
You have to reformat the whole drive, as the GUID partition map is off and needs to be updated correctly.
Also you can download the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant in advance and/or create "hold c" Lion boot DVD's from the MacAppStore Lion installer by holding option key and clicking on Purchases and downloading the Lion installer again and following these instructions.
http://eggfreckles.net/notes/burning-a-lion-boot-disc/
Also just in case you need it as you can always boot your Snow Leopard disk and install then upgrade to Lion on a blank drive without a Lion Recovery Partition.
http://www.walterjessen.com/make-a-bootable-backup-snow-leopard-install-disc/
Once you got Lion up, then Bootcamp the Windows 7 Pro.
You can try WinClone to clone Windows, I don't know how well it will work with Lion, it hasn't been updated recently, your best bet would be to fresh install.

Disk Utility will not partition

Hello,
I have a 7.5 TB drive (Fibre channel) that I'm trying to partition into 5 partitions. Every time I go into Disk Utility and try to partition it gives me an error message that says "file system formatter failed"
Verify Disk Permissions and Repair Disk Permissions are both greyed out in the first aid tab and both verify and repair disk operations fail.
Does anyone know of anything else that I can do to get this drive to repartition?
Thanks in advance for the help.
-Corinne

Are any of these partitions for Windows?
~Lyssa

Disk Utility fails when formatting a drive

Hi, I have been having problem with Disk Utility when formatting a drive. Every time I format a drive, regarding of what volume format I choose, it will start the format and then fail shortly after.
The drives are then no longer mountable and Disk Utility will not be able to see the drive any more.
Can some one tell me why this is failing? I have only ever experienced this problem on my Mac Pro.
Thanks

Thanks, The Hatter. Sorry I didn't include the internal drive information because so far, I have been using disk utility to format external drives and every time I tried to use it to format, it will fail (have not tried to format an internal drive as I only have one internal).
This is the detail of my internal drive.
Capacity: 298.09 GB
Model: WDC WD3200AAJS-41VWA0
Revision: 58.01D01
Serial Number: WD-WCARW3484394
Native Command Queuing: Yes
Queue Depth: 32
Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: No
BSD Name: disk0
Bay Name: "Bay 1"
Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
Partition Map Type: GPT (GUID Partition Table)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Verified
I have tried connecting external drives via, USB and Firewire. Have tried formatting drive to MS-DOS (Fat 32) or MacOS Extended and nothing works.
Please let me know if you need any more info.

External HD crashed by Disk Utility and all partitions gone

I had a 320GB Seagate external hard drive with 3 NTFS partitions.
They are 200GiB, 40GiB, 38.1GiB
I tried to format the middle partition into an Mac Partition and failed. After that, all partitions are gone and when I plug the HD into a PC, the disk manager recognize the whole space of disk as free.
the Log of the Disk Utility is as follows
2009-06-17 21:38:50 +0800: Preparing to erase : “PERSONAl”
2009-06-17 21:38:50 +0800: Partition Scheme: Master Boot Record
2009-06-17 21:38:50 +0800: 1 volume will be erased
2009-06-17 21:38:50 +0800: Name : “PERSONAl”
2009-06-17 21:38:50 +0800: Size : 38.1 GB
2009-06-17 21:38:50 +0800: Filesystem : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2009-06-17 21:38:53 +0800: Error with volume erase Invalid argument
2009-06-17 21:38:53 +0800: Erase complete.
Then a new "disk2" appears in the Disk Utility and can't be ejected easily. There's also something like picasaUpload stuff bumping up during the short formatting.
I tried to recover it using DiskTest 6.11 but it appears to take 14 hr to scan the whole disk and will not necessarily fix the problem.
I have Anyone have suggestion on how to recover the partition? The 200GiB partition is really important for me.

NTFS partitions can not be readily altered to begin with, and when there are multiple such partitions on a drive you should not attempt to alter only one. Since Disk Utility basically can't manage an NTFS partition, when you tried to alter the 'middle partition' (which in most cases is really a 'sub partition' or secondary partition to the 'main' or primary partition) you destroyed the whole of the volume's data structure. Unless you use a data recovery service or use data recovery software yourself, your data is gone. You should not attempt to alter NTFS formatted drives from Disk Utility.

Wife about to give birth and Disk Utility failing to repair HD.

Good morning. Starting last night I began having serious issues with my 2007 20" 2.4ghz iMac. I hope someone can help before I employ the "nuke" option.
First a little background. My wife is about to give birth to our second child. I have several in-laws in town and my house is a wreck. So, last night I thought it would be a great time to upgrade my iPhone 3G to iOS 4. I am not implying that updating my phone caused the problems with my iMac but they started about 30 seconds after pushing the "Update" button in iTunes.
The phone did update to iOS 4 after about 3 hours of backing up but immediately the iMac started "hanging up" and the spinning beach ball appeared for minutes at a time. late last night after my iPhone was functioning again, I went to bed.
This morning, the iMac was still responding very slowly and I was getting the spinning beach ball for even longer periods of time. So, I rebooted the machine and upon reboot the iMac would get stuck on the grey screen with the Apple logo and a spinning gear.
I tried all of the methods on this support document.
http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2570
It would not boot into Safe Mode.
I reset the NVRAM/PRAM.
I checked the power cables.
I removed all USB and perpherial attachments. (Including even trying to boot without the keyboard or mouse plugged in.)
After booting from the Install DVD and running Disk Utility, Disk Utility was telling me that almost the entire HD is available and that it could not repair the disk. I was receiving "Invalid Node Structure" and "Volume Check Failed" error messages.
So the last thing the support document suggested was a complete erase and re-install. I have been running Time Machine, but have never actually used it to recover anything, much less the 1000s of photos and 1000s of songs on the iMac.
Is there anything else I can or should try before pulling the plug and erasing the hard drive and praying that Time Machine has worked?
My very pregnant wife will have a heart attack if we lost everything on the computer. (I really am not joking that she might go into labor any second, her due date was last week.)
Thanks for the help and advice. I need it.

I know that I am a bother and asking alot of questions in quick succession, but I am hoping to take care of this before the baby makes its appearance.
I'm getting you have a lot on your mind right now, try not to not worry about it. Might be time to take a few deep breaths and try to relax.
If you have had your machine connected to Time Machine and it has been doing backups (I'm sure it has been) you have done everything necessary.
You can attempt an erase and restore however if your disk is dodgy or has failed at best it's a temporary solution. As I stated I would recommend taking it into an AASP and have it looked at.

Iomega external HD no longer mounting, disk utility fails to resolve issue.

I have an Iomega external HD (1TB) that's been working faithfully for two years as my time machine backup. I have Mac OS X 10.6.8. This morning, the HD was no longer showing up on my desktop. I have tried to mount the HD through disk utility and it states it is unable to mount the drive. A screenshot of what I see on disk utility is below. The drive still lights up, sounds like it is running and the drive is active. I have also done the following:
1. verfied drive; states it needs repairs. When repairs attempted, utility goes on, and on, and on with no progress and I have to force quit.
2. Have reset the PRAM and nothing changes.
3. Have started mac in safe mode, still not recognized and same error messages given in disk utility.
4. Other external HD works fine on mac, have not had any software changes/updates since yesterday that I know of that would affect anything.
5. USB and Firewire ports all functioning correctly and the drive is recognized on those under system profiler.
5. I have attached the problem HD to my Windows XP laptop (an old one but still works) and the drive is recognized under device manager but does not show on the desktop (formatted for mac though, so not too surprising).
Would appreciate anyone's advice on this one, have hit a wall.

Turn off Time Machine, select the 1TB ST310005 Media Drive instead of the Time Machine partition and see if it will Repair.
If that doesn't work, you might Erase / Repair / Format and start over providing that there is nothing critical on the Time Machine backup that you can't live without.

Disk Utility fails to partition

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