Disk Utility froze, HDs no longer functioning

I have a Western Digital MyBook 1TB external HD that consists of two 500GB drives in its enclosure. I had bought an OWC 1TB external of the same configuration, and a few days ago disk utility froze while verifying the disks. They were both set to RAID1, mirrored. Suddenly, their partitions weren't working properly and I was getting error messages telling me to backup my data. While I finally reformatted the OWC drive's partitions and setup my RAID1, the WD drive is only showing one of its two 500gb drives. What happened? How can I restore my WD Raid? Can I rely on these disks?

Don't know, but pointed you there because these forums are for Apple products, and disdain using WD products because they don't support booting Macs, even though they claim some should. Additionally, their crapola SmartWare is problematic.

Similar Messages

External drive - disk utility won't display long - can't repair

Long time mac user --- this one has me stumped.
I have an external disk that I'm using for time machine. USB3.
Sometimes I'm in a hurry and I don't disconnect it properly. Looks like that's messed up the drive - I get "disk not ejected properly" now. Fine. That happens. Reformat, repair, apply journal, whatever.
But the drive doesn't show up in disk utility or `diskutil list`. Or, it does show up, for almost exactly 10 seconds. Although, now, it seems to show up for only about 2 seconds. Too little time to click on it and try to repair it.
I see the drive pop in, 'disk1', and in diskutil list, then vanishes. In the diskutil GUI, it shows up for less time than that, maybe only a second or two. Then the dreaded "Disk not ejected properly" dialog shows up. Every once in a while, OSX seems to retry and the disk pops up. When it does, it's read enough volume information to see that there is a controller, it's found a disk of the right size, it knows about the old volume, and then it vanishes. again.
Any tips? How do I "nuke from orbit" if disk utility keeps vanishing the disk before I can click on it. Lay in wait and hope a click hits it?
There must be a better way.....

Love the resounding silence here.
The problem was hardware. Even though putting in a different disk to the dock seemed to work, that would detach after about 3 minutes.
Buying a new dock and switching to it solved the problem.
I wish I knew which system log would have helped me trouble shoot this without having to buy another doc, but at least it's not a software problem.

Disk Utility froze during partition resize.

Hi, i have a 1tb western digital external hard Drive which i use to store all my media and backups.
I set the partition to 950gb for media and the other 50gb for time machine to use to backup. This 50gb got used up pretty quickly, So i went and opened disk utility, deleted the 50gb time machine partition and then resized the 950gb partiton to 900gb so i could have 100gb for time machine.
So my 950gb media partition had over 550gb worth of files so i knew it would take a good few hours to peform this task. so 6 hours later i came back to my imac to check the progress and saw that it was in the "shrinking" stage and the bar was at about 95% complete.
So the next time i checked my imac was when i woke up the next day, it has now been 24 hours since i started and the bar is still on 95% complete and in shrinking stage. I thought it would of been completed by now but i carried on waiting. after 48 hours of waiting and the bar still being on 95% i figured that the disk utility had obviously crashed so i had no choice but to force quit disk utility.
I had a feeling that this would of somehow messed my hardive up and oh look.. it has. When i click on my external hardrive now all i get is a finder window appear with no results and a little spinning loading bar in the bottom right corner of the finder window. Left it for 15 mins but it still didnt load anything.
I am now in the middle of a "Repair disk" operation but it has been 12 hours and the bar is stuck at about 75%.
Any other ideas on whats gone wrong and how i can fix it? i have alot of important files on that hard drive and thousands of pounds worth of media. I will not be happy if ive lost that due to a fault in mac OS X.
Thanks for your time.

Unfortunately West Digital external drives have a very poor track record with Macs. I would recommend replacing it with a higher quality drive, something like a OWC, Lacie, or G-Tech.
In addition putting your backup and additional storage on the same external HD is a recipe for disaster. The reason is very simple, if that drive dies (and all eventually do) you will lose both your data and backup! Here is a recent article from or Macworld that discusses backup strategies, while I think the author is a little over the top having redundant backups is a very wise idea. Because external HD's are relatively inexpensive there really isn't any reason not to.
Roger

Disk utility app no longer working

I just discovered my disk utility app is no longer working. When I launch the app, its window opens and the message "Gathering disk information" along with the spinning gear icon appears in the window. Then the gear just spins and spins and .... I have a iMac model 12,1 with 10.8.5 OS X installed. Any help resolving the problem would be appreciated.
Cheers,
Mike

Restart in Safe Mode and try it there. If you are not familiar with Safe Mode simply hold down the Shift key when you hear the start up tone until a progress bar appears, once it does release the Shift key. This will clear some caches, its' possible one or more is corrupt. Post back with results after trying this.

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.

Disk Utility buggy?

When I start Disk Utility (on Leopard), I get the following worrying messages:
<pre>EBMacPro:Contents eboily$ MacOS/Disk\ Utility
2007-11-03 09:52:33.655 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Error loading /Users/eboily/Library/Plug-ins/DiskImages/VirtualPCDiskImagePlugin.bundle/Conte nts/MacOS/VirtualPCDiskImagePlugin: dlopen(/Users/eboily/Library/Plug-ins/DiskImages/VirtualPCDiskImagePlugin.bundl e/Contents/MacOS/VirtualPCDiskImagePlugin, 262): no suitable image found. Did find:
/Users/eboily/Library/Plug-ins/DiskImages/VirtualPCDiskImagePlugin.bundle/Conte nts/MacOS/VirtualPCDiskImagePlugin: mach-o, but wrong architecture
2007-11-03 09:52:33.656 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Cannot find function pointer MacDiskImagePluginFactory for factory 4D08F98C-8968-11D6-8667-0003933E9206 in CFBundle/CFPlugIn 0x54ab60 </Users/eboily/Library/Plug-ins/DiskImages/VirtualPCDiskImagePlugin.bundle> (bundle, not loaded)
2007-11-03 09:52:33.664 Disk Utility[7896:10b] ********
2007-11-03 09:52:33.672 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Disk Utility started.
2007-11-03 09:52:33.851 Disk Utility[7896:10b] * CFMessagePort: bootstrap_register(): failed 1100 (0x44c) 'Permission denied', port = 0x6303, name = 'com.apple.DiskUtility.ServiceProvider'
See /usr/include/servers/bootstrap_defs.h for the error codes.</pre>
Then I select the option to write zeros on the disk, MacOS Extended Journaled and I launch the erase option:
<pre>2007-11-03 09:58:23.121 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Preparing to zero disk : âdisk2s1â
2007-11-03 09:58:23.122 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Passes : 0</pre>
I then hit skip (Read about my 9-hours long experience without skipping here), I get
<pre>2007-11-03 09:59:05.813 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Secure Erase skipped after calculatingâ¦.
0.0% complete.
2007-11-03 09:59:05.840 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Preparing to erase : âdisk2s1â
2007-11-03 09:59:05.840 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Partition Scheme: Master Boot Record
2007-11-03 09:59:05.841 Disk Utility[7896:10b] 1 volume will be erased
2007-11-03 09:59:05.841 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Name : âdisk2s1â
2007-11-03 09:59:05.842 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Size : 931,5 GB
2007-11-03 09:59:05.842 Disk Utility[7896:10b] Filesystem : Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2007-11-03 09:59:05.868 Disk Utility[7896:10b] newfs_hfs: /dev/rdisk2s1: partition size not a multiple of 4K.
2007-11-03 09:59:05.875 DiskManagementTool[7897:10b] * Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSRangeException', reason: '[NOTE: this exception originated in the server.]
[NOTE: this exception originated in the server.]
[NOTE: this exception originated in the server.]
* -[NSCFString substringToIndex:]: Range or index out of bounds'
2007-11-03 09:59:05.877 DiskManagementTool[7897:10b] Stack: (
2498351723,
2516496539,
2498350481,
2487175270,
2487173129,
2498374346,
2498374450,
166599,
165830,
152358,
2487166563,
2497854334,
2497854776,
2487166389,
2487215828,
66120,
11390
2007-11-03 09:59:06.513 Disk Utility[7896:6377] DiskManagementTool has died. Disk Utility will need to be restarted.</pre>
Houston, we have a problem...
This happens on a very recent MacPro with plenty of memory, and the external hard drive is a My Book 1TB from Western Digital. Tried both interfaces, firewire or USB2 - same problem.
Apple, any idea? Will I be able to use my hard drive for time machine?
- Edouard

HL-DT-ST DVDRW GSA-S10N:
Firmware Revision: AP09
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
Media:
Type: DVD+R DL
ID: RITEK D01
Blank: Yes
Erasable: No
Overwritable: Yes
Appendable: Yes
Write Speeds: 2.4x
Disk Utility: Burn started, Mon Jan 28 19:53:05 2008
Disk Utility: Burning to DVD+R DL (RITEK D01) media with DAO strategy in HL-DT-ST DVDRW GSA-S10N AP09 via ATAPI.
Disk Utility: Requested burn speed was 47x, actual burn speed is 2.4x.
Disk Utility: Burn failed, Mon Jan 28 19:53:36 2008
Disk Utility: Burn sense: 3/0C/00 Medium Error, Write error
Disk Utility: Burn error: 0x8002006E The burn failed because of a medium write error.
Disk Utility: DVDRW GSA-S10N: SCSITask 86320.265625 CDB: Start/Stop Unit/Eject Media failed with service response = 1 (SERVICEDELIVERY_OR_TARGETFAILURE), status = 1 (TaskTimeoutOccurred)
Disk Utility: Retry #1
I am having this problem as well. Is there any way to get it resolved? This is a MacBook Pro 2.4 Ghz with a Santa Rosa chipset. I burned a DVD successfully almost a month ago:
Disk Utility: Burn started, Mon Dec 24 14:58:03 2007
Disk Utility: Burning to DVD+R DL (RITEK D01) media with DAO strategy in HL-DT-ST DVDRW GSA-S10N AP09 via ATAPI.
Disk Utility: Requested burn speed was 47x, actual burn speed is 2.4x.
Disk Utility: Burn finished, Mon Dec 24 15:39:16 2007
Disk Utility: Verify started, Mon Dec 24 15:39:16 2007
Disk Utility: Verify finished, Mon Dec 24 16:01:17 2007
Disk Utility: Burn started, Tue Dec 25 16:27:39 2007
Which is the same type of DL DVD. I am using Sony DL discs.

Disk Utility unable to format or partition external HD

Last weekend I bought Leopard and prepared everything in my iMac (PowerPC G5, 2.0 GHz) to install it. One of the things I tried was to repartition an external USB hard drive (Iomega 120 GB P/N: DHD120-C) for use with Time Machine. This drive was already formatted with HFS+ but I noticed that was using MBR, and I understand that for use with Time Machine you have to connect a disk using Apple Partition Scheme. Well, I used Disk Utility (still on Mac OS X 10.4.10), selected Partition, Options, Apple Partition Scheme instead of Master Boot Record and tried to apply changes to the drive. Disk Utility froze, I left it for more than one hour until I had to force quit it.
When my iMac rebooted an screen appeared saying that I had a drive not recognized and gave me the option to initialize it. A second failed attempt, Disk Utility froze again.
Finally, I decided to move to Leopard and try to fix the problem later. Everything went fine and while I was waiting I used a Windows machine to partition my external USB disk drive (used DISKPART to create a primary partition) and formatted it with NTFS because Windows told me that the drive was too large to use FAT32. In Leopard, I connected the drive, it mounted OK and used disk utility again to try to repartition it using Apple Partition Scheme and Mac OS Plus (which I understand is the same than HFS+). Disk Utility froze again, more than a couple of hours later I had to force quit it and now I'm using MacDrive in a Windows computer to format the drive, after creating again a primary partition using DISKPART, it seems to work without issues, formatted it using HFS+ in less than a minute. For me, the drive is working fine.
I'll test it with my Leopard iMac later, I'm sure it will mount OK but I'm also pretty sure that it will be recognized as Master Boot Record, which most certainly will give me problems if I try to use it with Time Machine (or not?). Can anybody please explain me what's happening between my iMac and the external hard drive?
Thanks in advance.

As expected, the disk formatted with MacDrive was recognized OK by my iMac. As soon as I connected it Time Machine offered to use it, I accepted and my first backup completed some time last night (I left it working and went to sleep).
Any ideas about what could be happening with the hard drive?

Windows based WD external hard drive not showing up in Disk Utility to reformat to Mac... how can I erase the drive

We have a WD external harddrive previously used with a PC that we want to completely erase and reformat for use with our iMac desktop for use with Time Machine. The drive shows up on the desktop of the Mac, but it does not show up in Disk Utlity, assuming because it's Windows format. Outside of the standard "erase" feature in Disk Utility, is there any way to reformat this drive for Mac OS X? Or how can I get this drive to show up in Disk Utility? Note: The drive functions properly, has power, and we are able to view its current contents through the desktop icon, so it is a working drive. And we are ok with losing all the current data on the drive.

Hmm strange, I had just moved my external Lacie drive from my windows machine to my iMac and it was showing up in disk utility still formatted fat32 or whatever. I would disconnect the drive and restart the machine then replug the drive and try again.
Also not that it will make a difference ( I dont think it will but hey why not ) try accessing disk utility from the install disk?

Disk Utility Freezes & MS Word & Excel Won't Launch

Yesterday, my Disk Utility froze when it started performing a Verify Disk and I had to force quit. This morning I was using both MS Excel and MS Word, closed them and when I tried to open them 30 minutes later, neither will launch and I get an error message saying that they "closed unexpectedly during launch." I tried to Verify Disk & Disk Utility froze again. Then I repaired permissions using Disk Utility but it didn't help with the Excel and Word issues. I have never had a problem with any of these before. I just used Disk Warrior to "Check All Files and Folders" and "Repair Disk Permissions" and Test the Hardware. I am still not able to open Word or Excel. Any thoughts??

Hard drive has 30.58 GB available. I didn't run disk utility from the OSX install disk -- am in the process of moving and not sure where it is. Might actually be in my home in another country!!!

System Freezes While Running Disk Utility?

While I was partitioning my disk, disk utility froze, along with my whole system. So I was forced to reboot.
Now my Mac thinks there's an 80 gb chunk of data somewhere (the data that would have been my partition), but I can't find it. How do I regain the lost space?

Try A reinstall with the original install disk, power down the machine, power back up push in the disk back in and hold "C" for a OSX reinstall which should leave your data intact.

Disk Utility refuses to work because of Lion!

I want to resize and add a partition (i.e. split a partition into two smaller partitions) on my hard drive, and I get the following error:
“Partition failed with the error: This operation requires a newer version of Mac OS X for this disk”
This is interesting (and annoying) because I used this exact computer and OS X version, 10.6.8, to format and partition this drive in the first place.
The reason must be the copy of Lion and/or the copy of the Lion installer (the full, “offline”-enabled installer that I made with the help of instructions) that I cloned onto the drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. I also cloned the Lion Recovery partition over. It probably also matters that I booted from all three partitions once (to test that they worked).
So...
what did Lion do to the partition map or whatever that causes the 10.6.8 Disk Utility app to no longer be able to change it and why?!
how do I undo this so I can use 10.6.8 Disk Utility to modify the partitions again?
I know I could just use 10.7's Disk Utility to get the job done now, but I don't want to be dependent on “OS X Vista” in the future.

You do not have to erase the HD. The problem is almost certainly the presence of the hidden "Lion Recovery" partition -- the Snow Leopard version of Disk Utility doesn't understand what it is so for safety's sake it won't let you change the partition map.
If you are willing to sacrifice that partition, you should be able to use Snow Leopard's Disk Utility to do what you want, although I can't guarantee this will work, or that it won't cause some unexpected problems with Lion. However, I have done this with a drive that originally had both Snow Leopard & Lion on separate partitions that I wanted to dedicate to Snow Leopard only, & it works fine for that.
With that understood, you can do this in Terminal. First, use "diskutil list" to get the IDENTIFIER value for the Lion Recovery partition. An example would be:
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk1s3
The IDENTIFIER value here would be disk1s3.
Now, erase the partition, converting it to a normal HFS+ volume Snow Leopard's Disk Utility will understand, with the following command, replacing {IDENTIFIER value} with what you got from the list command:
diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank /dev/{IDENTIFIER value}
An example would be:
diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ Blank /dev/disk1s3
IMPORTANT!! The previous step erases the contents of the partition. If you use the wrong IDENTIFIER value, you will erase the wrong partition, leaving you with a drive that won't start up your Mac, no data, etc. If you are not sure about this, don't try it! You really shouldn't be doing this OR resizing partitions without a backup, but if you are unable or unwilling to back things up, this is your only alternative.
At this point, quit Terminal, launch Snow Leopard's Disk Utility & confirm that it shows a new partition named "Blank," which should be about 650 MB. You should now be able to use Snow Leopard's Disk Utility to resize partitions, delete the "Blank" partition, etc.

Disk Utility hangs while initializing internal hard disk in Core Duo iMac

I have a 20" Core Duo iMac. Recently the internal hard drive crashed ("invalid B-tree node size" or something reported when Disk Utility tries and fails to repair it). I have all my data on an external hard disk used as a Time Machine volume, so recovery is not my issue. Initially I picked the write zeroes once security option and chose to erase the internal hard disk. Realizing this would take too long, I clicked on skip, and Disk Utility appeared to hang. I quit and restarted Disk Utility, and chose the "don't erase" security option, but when I go to erase the drive it appears to hang while at the "partitioning" stage and doesn't seem to get any further. There is motion in the progress bar, but no additional progress after about an hour. Disk Utility shows the disk but no volumes underneath it (whereas immediately after the crash, it showed an unmountable volume labeled "disk0s2").
Why would Disk Utility be taking so long and not making any progress? How can I reformat this disk if Disk Utility is not able to? Incidentally, I am running the Disk Utility that comes with OS X 10.4.8, since that is the OS X version on my portable hard drive that I booted from. I also tried using Drive Genius to initialize the hard disk, but it also appeared to hang with no progress.

It is possible the drive has failed, but to be sure start by turning off the computer. Wait five minutes. Then do this:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. 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. Set the number of partitions from the drop down menu (use 1 partition unless you wish to make more.) Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (only required for Intel 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.
Be sure to boot from the OS X installer DVD, not a backup clone.

Disk Utility - Partition free space?

Hi all
I'm wondering if Disk Utility (or similar) has the functionality to help me out here...
I have a 120gig fw external drive, currently it has only the one partition of 80gigs on it, the rest is free space (don't ask...).
I would like to format the other 31gigs as a useable partition without erasing the 50-odd gigs of music files that are on the first volume.
If this can't be done, that's really no big issue, I'll just use my iPod as a holding space while I repartition the external, but if it can, then this will be a valuable learning opportunity for me & I'll be happy to know the way around.
Thanks in advance

4069
Hi Dr_Dodgy,
You cannot do that with Disk Utility.
There is a third-party application for partitioning a hard drive without losing anything, so I guess this app would be able to do that too.
Not sure, was it "iPartition"? I don't know it anyway, so I can say for sure only about DU.
Axl

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.

How to enable disk utility verify/fix permissions

My iMac is running os x 10.6.8 snow leopard.
A month ago the system(software) was re-installed by apple store for a fixing of booting panic.
It's all fine know but I found the disk utility's verify/fix permissions functions were disabled. My question is: what'll cause this and how to enable them?
Thanks

elimqiu wrote:
It's all fine know but I found the disk utility's verify/fix permissions functions were disabled. My question is: what'll cause this and how to enable them?
You mean verify/repair disk, not permissions. Forget about repair permissions. It's a waste of time.
As for verify/repair, you cannot repair the volume you are booted from so you need to boot from some other bootable volume. That could be Disk Utility launched on your Installer dvd or a external bootable backup.

Disk Utility froze, HDs no longer functioning

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