Does Your Disk Utility App Stop Running Under Mac OS 10.9 - Mavericks

Question

I am using a 2012 MacBook Air running Mac OS 10.9 - Mavericks. The Disk Utility app Verify function stops running, most often during the "Checking Volume Information" part of the test, and does not display any results. The app does not crash: I can run Verify over and over. The app simply stops running. Does anyone else have this problem?

Answer 1

I have a Drobo (2nd Gen) attached to my early 2009 Mac Pro via Firewire and it consistently has this problem with the Disk Utility app on Mavericks.
Maybe there's a timeout on the Disk Utility.
It seems that diskutil and fsck on the command line work.
First, get the device identifier for the volume you want to check:
bash-3.2$ diskutil list /Volumes/Drobo
/dev/disk5
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *17.6 TB    disk5
   1:                        EFI EFI                     209.7 MB   disk5s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Drobo                   17.6 TB    disk5s2
then, use diskutil to  verify the volume:
bash-3.2$ sudo diskutil verifyVolume /dev/disk5s2
Started file system verification on disk5s2 Drobo
Checking file system
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Checking extents overflow file
Checking catalog file
Checking multi-linked files
Checking catalog hierarchy
Checking extended attributes file
Checking volume bitmap
Checking volume information
The volume Drobo appears to be OK
Finished file system verification on disk5s2 Drobo
You can also use fsck in debug mode if you like more verbose output. Here I first unmount and then use the raw device:
root# diskutil umount /Volumes/Drobo
Volume Drobo on disk5s2 unmounted
root# fsck_hfs -d -l -f  /dev/rdisk5s2
** /dev/rdisk5s2 (NO WRITE)
        Using cacheBlockSize=32K cacheTotalBlock=98304 cacheSize=3145728K.
   Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-226.1.1).
** Performing live verification.
** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
   The volume name is Drobo
** Checking extents overflow file.
** Checking catalog file.
** Checking multi-linked files.
** Checking catalog hierarchy.
** Checking extended attributes file.
** Checking volume bitmap.
** Checking volume information.
** The volume Drobo appears to be OK.
        CheckHFS returned 0, fsmodified = 0
Then remount:
root# diskutil mount /dev/disk5s2 
Volume Drobo on /dev/disk5s2 mounted
You should really read the fsck man page if you go this route. There are many options and many ways you could accidentally do something you don't intend to do.
Enjoy!
~f