Firewire hard drive won't mount - Filesystem verify or repair failed.

Hi all - over the last day my lacie hard drive won't mount - i have tried it on various computers with the same result
disk utility can see it but won't mount or repair it reporting the following error
Filesystem verify or repair failed.
any help would be appreciated
best
darren/uk

Try Disk Utility first. It's in your Applications/Utilities folder.
You'll want to select the disk in question, then +Repair Disk+ (not Permissions). This actually repairs the +File System+ that's on the disk.
If that works, you're ok, unless it begins happening frequently. Then you need to save up for a new one.
If DU can't fix it, then one of the others might. Disk Warrior is about $100, and many people here say it's the best. There are others for less money, but there's no guarantee that any of them will succeed.
You can also try just erasing it, and choose +Security Options,+ then +Zero Out Data.+ If that fails, or you have more problems with the drive, you need a new one.

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Hello maccynicwhoalwayshasmacs,
Thanks for the question. After reviewing your post, it sounds like trouble with an external HD mounting. I would recommend that you read this article, it may be able to help you resolve or isolate the issue.
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External Firewire hard drive won't mount after 10.4.10 update

I see many posts about USB drives not mounting after 10.4.10 update. Just lending my voice to that issue (my USB drive won't work either) as well as the 10.4.10 update breaking Firewire drives.
Hope a fix is coming. No backups are scaaaary.

How to fix the problem of a missing external Hard Drive (Firewire) after it vanishes from you desktop after installing 10.4.10 update.
I have a iMac PPC (Non intel). Aparently my system upated installed the wrong version of 10.4.10 and thus my external firewire hard drives a 320 GB Westerndigital My Book, and Acomdata 80 GB, and aWestern Digital 160 GB media center all vanished from the desktop.
The instructions below should be credited to several different people. I found various version of these steps in the Discussion. I combines a few of them into this one 10 step fix and it worked for me. I hope it works for you.
1) Shut down you computer
2) Unplug all peripherals (i.e USB and Firewire, I left computer power plug in as well as ethernet and Keyboard+ Mouse) and leave along for 30 Minutes
3) Restart holding down the Command (Apple) + Option + P + R keys for three startup bongs, then release the keys and your computer will start up as usual.
4) Verify and repair disk Permission using Disk Utility. (Several things were repaired here)
5) Instal 10.4.10 Combo PPC
6) Restart Again
7) Again repair Disk permissions (None of mine needed to be repaired fyi this time)
8) Unplug Power cable and Firewire cable from External Hard Drive (leave along for 1 minute)
9) Reconnect power to Firewire External Drive first then the Firewire cable to the drive second, then the firewire cable from the Drive to the computer last.
10) Turn on your Firewire Drive... you will head it spin up and eventually show up on your desktop just like it did before the 10.4.10 update.

IMac internal hard drive won't mount/can't be repaired

hi there,
my 11yo son has been using my older imac. it's a 24" 2.4ghz imac with a 500gb drive from around 2007, i think. anyway, yesterday he said it was acting funny, he restarted it and it hung on the grey screen with the logo.
i looked at it more closely today and tried restarting in safe mode, tried the PRAM thing, and got no where. i then booted from the 10.6 dvd that i have. i ran disk utility and tried verifying and repairing it. it said there was a missing thread record (id = 92600) and an invalid sibling link. it tried to rebuild catalog b-tree.
then it said that disk utility can't repair the disk. i tried to re-install the system software, but disk utility couldn't mount it.
the system profiler can see the disk, but as i mentioned, i can't get it to mount and am sort of at a loss here. thought? ideas?
thanks in advance,
emily

Your HD seems to have crashed. I would recommend running Apple Hardware test 3x in Extended Mode, if you get error codes as I supsect this will confirm the problem. If you aren't familiar with AHT you will need the original install discs that shipped with the computer and you can find instructions at:
support.apple.com/kb/ht1509
If it errors your next step is taking it in for repair at your local Apple Store or AASP.

Unmounted External Hard Drive, Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed

Earlier today, I disconnected the external hard drive while it was working.
Now, the External Hard Drive won't even show up on my computer. However, on the Disk Utility it does. I have tried to verify & repair the disk. Plus click the mount button nothing work.
Whenever, I ran the system verify or the repair. I got this error: Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed
Ok. So I have searched all over the internet and forums. Tried everything. Nothing works.
I even tried Disk Warrior. It would work for a while, then when it came to step 8. It would make my computer go black and hold down the power button to restart.
Any suggestions? Please let me know, I would like to recover the files if I can. Thanks.
P.S.Yes I have tried to restart multiple time. I have tried with my USB 2.0, firewire 400, & 800 too.. Nothing.Everyone except the USB shows up in the disk utility but doesn't mount.

I have had the exact same situation occur, but was able to follow these steps to successfully save everything!!
The Unix program "dd" will instruct a drive to stream out all of it's data from beginning to end without regard to file structure, therefore creating an exact block-for-block duplicate. By doing this, it will allow you to copy everything off without having to mount the drive. It also ignores any corruption or physically damaged blocks on the drive which would otherwise crash or freeze the Finder. It saves the data to a disk image file which you can then open and use without fear of imminent failure (the format of the disk image will be the same as the original drive). Now that the data is preserved, you can safely go through and recover your files. Keep in mind that if a file was damaged or corrupted on the drive, it will be unusable, but at least you'll be able to get to the good ones safely. In my case, using "dd", I had no problems and got every file off. If it doesn't work for you, at least it's impossible for just trying it to further damage your files. I can recommend a few other remedies if this doesn't work for you.
Note: The computer must be able to at least recognize the drive. That means either 1) It mounts 2) When you connect the drive the Finder asks if you want to erase or ignore, click ignore and you should be able to do this, or 3) Nothing happens in the Finder, but the volume in question does appear in Disk Utility. If you connect the drive and absolutely nothing happens and it never shows up in Disk Utility, it won't work.
Note: As always, it is suggested that you backup important data on your startup disk before proceeding with stuff like this. It is possible to wipe a drive by mistyping a terminal command, so double check before you hit enter.
_Now, on with the show!_
Prep: Restart your machine so that it goes straight to the login window. Enter your user name and password. As soon as you press enter after your password, immediately hold down the shift key until the Finder finishes loading (this prevents any background startup items from running that might interfere).
1. Attach the drive to the computer and make sure you have another drive with enough free space to hold the entire capacity of the bad drive, not just it's used space, but the WHOLE size of the bad drive (for exception, see very bottom of this post).
2. In Terminal, type:
+diskutil list+
Look for the drive you want to recover in the "name" column, then write down it's "identifier" (ex. disk1s2)
3. In Terminal, type:
+dd bs=512 if=/dev/disk#s# of=/my_directory/image.dmg conv=noerror,sync+
!! Replace "disk#s#" with the identifier you wrote down before !!
!! Replace "/my_directory/" with the path to where you want to save !!
!! Replace "image.dmg" with the name you want to give the disk image (must end with .dmg) !!
4. To confirm that something is happening, open Activity Monitor (in the Utilities folder) and click "Disk Activity". Once you determine an average transfer rate, divide the size of the drive by that and then divide by 60 to see how many minutes it will take to finish. *+! ! FOR LARGE DRIVES THIS WILL TAKE A VERY LONG TIME ! !+* To be safe, do not use your computer for anything until the process finishes, you can leave Activity Monitor open so you can see when it's finished.
If you're only really concerned about a certain files and you know their exact path on the bad drive, let me know and I can give you modified instructions to copy just those files, saving the time and space of doing the whole drive.

External Hard Drive Won't Mount- Need to recover files

Hello Everyone,
I am hoping that one of you fine mac experts may be able to assist ~
Problem: External Seagate FreeAgent Desktop USB external hard drive
won't mount on desktop=ie: no access to my important files.. Please Help!
Details:
External seagate freeagent 500 GB Desktop USB HD ( only 2 months old)
(using for document / file backup-not as a startup disc)
on my Mac G3 350 MZ Blue & White Tower /768 ram/ running OSX 10.1.5 & OS9.2~
~
Problem: Started using the external 500 GB HD 2 months ago -with no problems-until this morning. Tried to double click to open it to access files
and got the "beach ball of death" and needed to restart.
My trusty G3 started up fine, however, the external HD was now
not showing up on the desktop as normal. I troubleshooted -by restarting,
trying different a/c plugs/ different USB ports , ran disk utility..called
seagate -not much help . Seagate said to try the HD on another mac-which I did-
a G5 tower- same problem.
~
The External hard drive will show up in disk utility, but is grayed out.
and when click "mount" same two messages keep showing:
message 1: "a disk attempting to mount as unknown has failed verification or has failed to
mount.please use disk utility to check the disk"
~
message 2- when unplugging and repluggin the usb in-and upon
restart:" you have inserted a disk containg no volumes that mac osx
can read to use unreadable volumes,click initialize to continue with the disk inserted ,click continue"
~
( I really need access to these files- and do not want to re-initialize the HD!!)
I ran Disk Utility /first aid "verify & repair , the following info came up:
Repairing disk "main backup 2007 ".
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid key length ( <<<IN RED )
Repair completed. "
~~
Though it said the repair was completed, the "invalid key length" issue
still comes up when re-running disk utility...Hard drive would still not
mount on desktop-even after restarting .
~~~~~
If there is a mac genius out there that can help?- it would be greatly
appreciated. I have tried to call seagate several times in the last several hours-
1st time-they disconnected me after being on hold 10 minutes-2nd call
I was put on hold for 40 minutes ..Finally spoke to someone ( they are not mac users or mac experts!)and he said I would need to send it to Seagate's Data Recovery-... for a fee of course!
~~~
At this point, I am hoping to just get the files and photos off
the hard drive- I heard about Disk Warrior-should I use that and if so
what version?
Thank you very much!
L

Will zapping the PRAM be of any use in getting the external to mount on the desktop?
Your external Hard drive is already recognized. But it cannot be mounted on the desktop due to its directory damage. You can certainly Zap the PRAM, and it will not hurt anything, but I am skeptical that it will change the situation.
Do you think the Disk Warrior 4.0 cd will even work on my G3 350MHZ running Mac OS 10.1.5?
If you boot from the CD and run it from the CD, absolutely yes. If you attempt to INSTALL it from a download or a CD, probably not.
Have you ever used Disc Warrior and is using it complicated?
I own and use Disk Warrior. You select the drive to be rebuilt, it builds a proposed new directory from the information and file fragments available.
When complete, it will provide a list of problems encountered, tell you what files have been placed in the "Rescued Items" folder, and allow you too look at your drive using the proposed new directory. Your only decision is whether the new directory seems to be an improvement over the old \[in your case, hopelessly corrupted] directory. You then tell it whether to replace the old directory with the proposed new directory, or to abandon its work and leave your Hard Drive unchanged.
Is there a good chance that the ext HD will still have my files on it- or do you think from what I've described that they are gone ?
From what you have described, your files are very likely to still be there. Sometimes in a situation like this, a handful of files cannot be recovered.
My other thought was to take the external HD there and have them try to recover the files.
Make sure you completely understand the costs involved. File recovery using a service like DriveSavers can run into many hundreds of dollars. They are prepared to disassemble your drive in a clean room and replace controller boards and read/write heads to achieve success. Your drive has serious, but not fatal, Directory damage. The Hardware, and most of your files, are likely just fine.

New Hard Drive Won't Mount

I have an iMac running Leopard 10.5.1 and recently bought a 500GB drive to go into an external housing. All went well but when I turned it on...nothing.
I looked at system profiler and it sees my disk and tells me the size etc and that it's connected to the firewire bus.
In disk utility it shows, but in the disk tree, the actual partition is greyed out although the disk itself is there.
I cant mount it from there, I get the following error 'Disk cannot be mounted, try running first aid'. So I run first aid and then get the following message: 'filesystem verify or repair failed'
So I take it out of that housing (a FW 400 Firecor II rack unit caddy system) and try it in a LaCie housing (Quadra aluminium style) BINGO, Mounted first time!
So I put it back in the Firecor unit...nothing! So I tried putting the original LaCie drive that was originally in the housing into the Firecor system..Nothing!
I have another 3 caddy drives that all work fine with the Firecor so I know it's not that and I've tried every configuration, every jumper position, other leads etc etc but I'm stumped. Why does it work in one external housing and not another? Why does the system see it but refuse to mount it?
Any ideas?

No please enlighten me!
Don't forget though that I have others that work perfectly well in the same enclosure and have done for a number of years.
Having done some research it appears that the FW chipset on my Firecor system may not be fully supported by Leopard. It may work, it may not, which is what now appears to be happening.
To make sure, I powered it up on my old POwerbook with 10.4.9 and it worked no problem with both new drives.
I'd still love to know your thoughts...

Lacie Hard Drives won't mount

My two Lacie hard drives won't mount on my G5 running Tiger. They were fine on my G4 iMac running Panther. I've tried using the Lacie Update Tool but the drives aren't recognised. I've tested the firewire cables on another drive that works and they're fine, so it's not cables.
Both drives power up okay and whir into action, but just aren't talking to the G5.
Lacie d2 HD 80GB FW DV
Lacie 40GB (no model number, "DESIGN BY F.A.PORSCHE", no model number).
Any ideas much appreciated.

Reply
This happened to me with a LaCie external drive as well.
The problem is that LaCie formats the drives as PC-based
and not Mac Extended, so unless you reformatted the
drives to Mac when you started using them, your access
to them on any Mac may result in a failure to mount.
Once that happens retrieval of data is made more difficult
because of this formatting incongruity.
There is no way you can get the data once your G4 quits
mounting them. If you can get the data off of the drives,
back it up and then reformat the drives using Mac's Disc
Utility. Then you can reload the data and I suspect all of
your Macs will then mount the drives via Firewire.
Good Luck!
My two Lacie hard drives won't mount on my G5 running
Tiger. They were fine on my G4 iMac running Panther.
I've tried using the Lacie Update Tool but the drives
aren't recognized. I've tested the firewire cables on
another drive that works and they're fine, so it's
not cables.
iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.4)

Hard Drive Won't Mount After Repair by Second Computer

I have an G4 Cube with OS 10.2 on the internal hard drive (which is full) and OS 10.4 on an external La CIe hard drive (that I use as my main OS). The external hard drive accumulated serious damage that couldn't be repaired by Disk Utility on the internal drive. My copy of DiskWarrior X would not run under OS 10.2 (10.4 was required) and it wouldn't boot from the CD either So I connected the external hard drive to my second computer, an iMAC running OS 10.5. (Unfortunately, I disconnected the external hard drive when the computer was off instead of ejecting the drive by dragging it to the Wastebasket.) The external drive mounted and DiskWarrior easily constructed a new directory, defragmented the files, and eliminated all of the damage on the external hard drive visible to Disk Utility. However, when I reconnected the repaired external hard drive to the G4 Cube, the drive wouldn't mount. Privileges were repaired on both computers with the external drive connected without helping. Being repaired while connected to a higher OS or perhaps simply being connected to a higher OS seems to have left the LaCie external hard drive in a state which couldn't be mounted by an earlier OS.
Following this hypothesis, it booted the G4 Cube from the OS 10.4 Installation CD while the LaCie external hard drive was connected. When I cancelled installation of OS 10.4, I was asked to choose a start-up disk AND OS 10.4 WAS NOW MAGICALLY AVAILABLE ON THE EXTERNAL DRIVE. Simply starting up from a more advanced OS allowed the hard drive to mount.
Shockingly, when I restarted from OS 10.2, the external hard drive was still mounted. Whatever was preventing the drive from mounting was a TRANSIENT STATE, not backwards incompatability.
POSSIBLE LESSON: If a hard drive won't mount on computer A after being connected to computer B, consider booting computer A using the OS on the installation disk from computer B.

If you need to repair a hard drive with OS X installed on it, you must use that same version of OS X to perform the repair. Using another--in this case, newer--OS can cause quite a bit of trouble, as the directories/permissions may be dealt with differently between the OS's.
Seems you've learned this lesson--and luckily you didn't lose anything!
~Lyssa

External Hard Disk Error - Error filesystem verify or repair failed

Hi
I can't seem to mount my WD external hard disk. Run Disk Utility and these are the error messages:
Invalid node structure
Invalid node structure
Catalog file entry not found for extent
Volume check failed
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed
Does anyone know what is wrong and how do I fix this problem? Is it a hard disk failure? Will I be able to recover my data? Thanks!
_These are are hard disk specs:_
Manufacturer: WD
Model: 0x1103
GUID: 0x90A90464263DC1
Maximum Speed: Up to 800 Mb/sec
Connection Speed: Up to 400 Mb/sec
Sub-units:
My Book Unit:
Unit Software Version: 0x10483
Unit Spec ID: 0x609E
Firmware Revision: 0x1028
Product Revision Level: 1028
Sub-units:
My Book SBP-LUN:
Capacity: 931.51 GB
Removable Media: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
Mac OS 9 Drivers: No
Partition Map Type: APM (Apple Partition Map)
S.M.A.R.T. status: Not Supported
My Book Device Unit:
Unit Software Version: 0x10483
Unit Spec ID: 0x609E
Firmware Revision: 0x1028
Product Revision Level:
Sub-units:
My Book Device SBP-LUN:

You will need Disk Warrior to fix the problem if Disk Utility cannot. However, to fix with DU you need to do this:
Repairing the Hard Drive and Permissions
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, Leopard or Snow Leopard.) After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer. Now restart normally.
If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

Reboot lafter 10.5.8 2@1TB drives - "Filesystem Verify or Repair failed".

BACKGROUND:
Ok so I upgraded (patched) Parallels a couple of days ago, but didn't reboot yet (I was busy). Then I see the auto update showing me 10.5.8 so I grab that and it's sitting there waiting for me to reboot.
I have 4 browsers open (not windows, browsers - firefox, camino, safari & flock) for about a total of 40-50 windows. parallels is open, excel and word are open and so is thunderbird, iPhoto and a few other random things including time machine (once open I tend not to shut them down). So the systems decides it's had enough and crashes hard (to reboot) it looks like it come sup clean except I get a message about one of my 1TB drives is unavailable but mounted so I can recover data.
I tried to run disk utility to get it back online but I get Invalid inode structure, "Filesystem Verify or Repair failed". I reboot, same. I shutdown, power off, the same. I try my 10.5.6 CD, the same.
I reboot again and go into disk utility and I try to repartition one of the failed drives (time machine drive) and that fails but it does mount the drive so I can read it.
I try to repair the other failed drive and in the meantime I get an external 1TB drive to see if I can recover the time machine data to an external location before I try to putz with it again.
QUESTION:
So anyway any ideas how to get these drives to come back up clean? I'm not so concerned with the data as I run multiple copies of the data across a NAS and two of the three drives. fsck is just not getting me ther as I can't reliably get the drives remounted.

Ok I tried to verify the two drives. One failed to umount (that's ok, more later) and the other umounted but failed to verify.
I attached an external 1TB drive. Formatted it and fired up Synk Pro. I dropped all of the directories from the failed disk into Synk and pointed it at the external drive.
I'm going to bed now and expect Synk to have copied my data from the failed drive by morning. If that all goes well then I'll grab another external drive adn see if on reboot the other disk comes up (it's the time machine disk). I'd like to recover all of that and then repartition the drive that is now working (kinda) and put the data back. I'll also grab a copy of DiskWarrior and see if I can get the second drive back online.
More later.

Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed - Mounting, repairing, recovering

Mac experts,
I need your help.
I have the following problem.
I have an old PM G5 Tiger hard drive that would not mount nor can be repaired by disk utilities (Leopard Disk Utility or Disk Warrior). I bought a new HD and installed Leopard on it. The old Tiger HD showed the following on Leopard Disk Utility (First Aid failed):
Verifying volume "PM G5 hd"
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Invalid record count.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid record count
Invalid record count
Invalid record count
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
I wanted to recover my files from the old Tiger HD and transfer to the new Leopard hard drive. What are my options?
Please advise and kindly spellout stepwise on how to recover or backup the contents of this old hard drive before it finally die.
Thanks.

Thank you for your suggestions.
The Tiger HD cannot be booted at all.
I tried your second suggestion. I plugged the Tiger HD and booted the Leopard HD.
The Tiger HD can be seen by Disk Utility, still unmounted and greyed out.
Again, the old Tiger HD showed the following on Leopard Disk Utility (First Aid failed):
Verifying volume "PM G5 hd"
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume
Invalid record count.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid record count
Invalid record count
Invalid record count
Volume check failed.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
What do these "comments" mean?
Do you reckon my Tiger hard drive is corrupted and can not be repaired with any Mac Disk Utilities?
I will try your first suggestion with Ubuntu live CD and see if I can recover my files at least.
Again, thank you for your help. Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Western Digital 1TB Hard D "Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed."

I've had this external Western Digital hard drive for a year, it stopped working, tried to repair in disc utility, repair/verify failed
"Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed."
thats all i get!
now what do i do?

If you have the data backed up, try using Disk Utility's Erase tab to reformat it. Then restore the data from backup.
If you have no backups, you might have good luck with DiskWarrior. It costs about $100.
If neither of those help, it sounds like the drive is dead.

Using fsck on internal slave bus and "Filesystem verify or repair failed"

Hello-
I had to move quite a few files today and in the blink of the eye, I lost my internal 200gig drive on the slave bus. Disk Utility sees the disk but will not mount the volume, giving the error "Invalid B-tree node size: 2010-08-08 22:24:33 -0500: Volume check failed. Filesystem verify or repair failed." Stellar Phoenix sees all the files but I can hardly afford $99 at the moment.
Can I reboot in Safe Mode and access the slave drive through fsck? Or is fsck -fy only for the startup drive?
Thank You.
Rick

Unfortunately, fsck cannot repair that error any more than Disk Utility. You need Disk Warrior to repair the drive assuming it's even repairable.

Does "Filesystem verify or repair failed" mean new HD?

Hi all
Just need to know, for sure, if this means my MacAir is in need of a new Hard Drive?
Safe Mode (Boot) takes me to my log in and then won't log in.
Disk Utility stops at:
Verifying and Repair volume "disk0s4"
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
New HD ?
Mike

Thanks for the bit of help. It gave me encouragement to keep dogging the problem.
But still have the problem with a bit of a twist!
I've was able to do the Apple Hardware Test First Aid the indepth xtended one. The result was all's good.
Now then with the Safe Startup...
It gets to the login screen (no red text about welcome to safe start, or some such).
On the log in screen I have 3 choices:
Myself
My wife
Guest
I can get to the internet with Guest login
I can log into the MacAir as My wife.
As for loging in as myself.. Screen goes white then reverts back to the log in screen with the 3 choices..
Logged in as my wife, I did the recent "big" OS update. (Takes quite awhile)
But still. I can't log in as me!
So as I can log in as my wife, is there some way some fix I can do.
Should I (if I can) reload Lion from the TC?
Help me please!
Mike

Firewire hard drive won't mount - Filesystem verify or repair failed.

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