Hard drive i/o error, spinning beachballs. PASSES Smart test, but fails two specific parameters:

I'm on a Macbook from early 2007.
First off, I'm fully aware that my HD is probably on its last legs and I have two gigantic TB external HDs on which there are multiple images of the entire drive, so data loss is not currently a problem for me. I've also just finished college assignments for the summer so I can afford to mess around with this a bit before taking the plunge and replacing it.
What intrigues me is this. The machine has been extremely slow for a long time. Recently I disabled swapping and the speed rocketed, presumably due to the HD being utilized less during usage. Now the downside to disabling swapping is that when Safari Web Content gets out of control as it always eventually does, you can have a full on system hang which requires a forced shutdown through the power button. So it's very possible that the issues I'm currently experiencing are to do with the machine being improperly shut down one too many times and somehow damaging the drive itself.
But anyway, this is the interesting aspect. Using TTP I ran a SMART test on the internal HD from one of the bootable partitions on one of the external ones, and to my astonishment, it actually PASSES the smart test. The only two parameters which fail are the following:
Raw Read Error Rate
Write Error Count
An image of the SMART test results is attached:
Now to give you an example of the kind of issues I'm having, in order to take that screenshot I used "Grab". When searching for Grab in spotlight it gave me results from the internal HD and from all the various backup drives I have attached. I opened the internal copy and one from a backup partition on another drive (neither of which currently booted from). The one from the backup bounced and opened. The one from internal bounced about 15 times, the spotlight bar hung with a spinning beacball, and I ended up force quitting because I got sick of waiting for it. That's the major symptom of the issue I'm having.
Now here's the reason I'm posting. As I say I know this drive is about to go so there's no need to lecture me about that, I can't replace it immediately but plan to in the very near future when I have a chance. My question is this. Those two specific failed SMART results, what exactly would cause them in terms of HD problems? Bearing in mind that it passes every single other SMART parameter, am I looking at unmapped bad blocks, a physical problem with the head, a loose wire, a bad motor, or what? I'm just wondering specifically what might be wrong with the drive, out of pure curiosity more so than anything else. The fact that most parameters pass suggests to me that it's one very specific malfunction as opposed to the drive generally imploding.
A surface scan from TTP crashed, but not before giving me about 30 "Used block is not a file" messages.
Finally, to temporarily use this drive, what's the procedure? If it's unmapped bad blocks, to I erase and install, or do I go into the whole "zero all data, then reformat" option? I have a backup image taken last night from the external drive which I can restore to the internal any time I want, and as I say with so many backups and so few deadlines ahead of me I don't mind messing around a bit and experimenting.
So if it IS a bad block issue, what does one do to force it to map them?

Had a feeling. As I say it's already fully backed up and ATM I'm running the machine off a partition on the external. But as I say, I'm curious as to what's actually wrong with it - what type of damage / failure would cause those specific smart parameters to fail but not the rest? The motor, the head, the disk surface, what?

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New WD Hard Drive ATA Link Errors

Hi there,
I just bought a new hard drive for my lenovo ThinkPad R60e. It is the following model:
# hdparm -I
ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: WDC WD5000BUDT-63G8FY0
Firmware Revision: 01.01A01
Transport: Serial, SATA 1.0a, SATA II Extensions, SATA Rev 2.5, SATA Rev 2.6
Standards:
Supported: 8 7 6 5
Likely used: 8
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16383
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064
LBA user addressable sectors: 268435455
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 976773168
Logical Sector size: 512 bytes
Physical Sector size: 4096 bytes
Logical Sector-0 offset: 0 bytes
device size with M = 1024*1024: 476940 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 500107 MBytes (500 GB)
cache/buffer size = unknown
Nominal Media Rotation Rate: 5400
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Queue depth: 32
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, with device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = 0
Advanced power management level: 128
Recommended acoustic management value: 128, current value: 254
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5 udma6
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=120ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
* Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
* READ_BUFFER command
* NOP cmd
* DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
* Advanced Power Management feature set
Power-Up In Standby feature set
* SET_FEATURES required to spinup after power up
SET_MAX security extension
* Automatic Acoustic Management feature set
* 48-bit Address feature set
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
* FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
* SMART error logging
* SMART self-test
Media Card Pass-Through
* General Purpose Logging feature set
* 64-bit World wide name
* URG for READ_STREAM[_DMA]_EXT
* URG for WRITE_STREAM[_DMA]_EXT
* IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD
* {READ,WRITE}_DMA_EXT_GPL commands
* Segmented DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
* Gen1 signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
* Gen2 signaling speed (3.0Gb/s)
* Native Command Queueing (NCQ)
* Host-initiated interface power management
* Phy event counters
* Idle-Unload when NCQ is active
* NCQ priority information
DMA Setup Auto-Activate optimization
Device-initiated interface power management
* Software settings preservation
* SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
* SCT Features Control (AC4)
* SCT Data Tables (AC5)
unknown 206[12] (vendor specific)
unknown 206[13] (vendor specific)
unknown 206[14] (vendor specific)
Security:
Master password revision code = 65534
supported
not enabled
not locked
not frozen
not expired: security count
supported: enhanced erase
138min for SECURITY ERASE UNIT. 138min for ENHANCED SECURITY ERASE UNIT.
Logical Unit WWN Device Identifier: 50014ee60132e99d
NAA : 5
IEEE OUI : 0014ee
Unique ID : 60132e99d
Checksum: correct
As it uses Advanced Format, I did an aligned partitioning as you can see here:
# fdisk -u -l
Disk /dev/sda: 500.1 GB, 500107862016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60801 cylinders, total 976773168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x04801fe0
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 2048 224909 111431 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 224912 44275139 22025114 83 Linux
/dev/sda3 44275144 48484169 2104513 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 48484176 976768064 464141944+ 83 Linux
After that I tried to copy my old system and data from the old hard drive (The new WD drive was built into the laptop and the old drive connected via SATA2USB adaptor). After a few minutes the hdd started to hang and the following messages occured in "dmesg"
[ 934.624568] ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
[ 934.624575] ata1.00: BMDMA stat 0x25
[ 934.624583] ata1.00: failed command: WRITE DMA EXT
[ 934.624596] ata1.00: cmd 35/00:80:68:2b:13/00:01:2d:00:00/e0 tag 0 dma 196608 out
[ 934.624599] res 61/04:10:f0:1c:13/04:00:2d:00:00/e0 Emask 0x1 (device error)
[ 934.624606] ata1.00: status: { DRDY DF ERR }
[ 934.624611] ata1.00: error: { ABRT }
[ 934.631465] ata1.00: failed to read native max address (err_mask=0x1)
[ 934.631472] ata1.00: HPA support seems broken, skipping HPA handling
[ 934.646871] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133 (device error ignored)
[ 934.646890] ata1: EH complete
[ 1234.019934] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[ 1239.033266] ata1: device not ready (errno=-16), forcing hardreset
[ 1239.033279] ata1: soft resetting link
[ 1244.199930] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[ 1249.053269] ata1: SRST failed (errno=-16)
[ 1249.053282] ata1: soft resetting link
[ 1254.219921] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[ 1259.073267] ata1: SRST failed (errno=-16)
[ 1259.073279] ata1: soft resetting link
[ 1264.239938] ata1: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
First I thought it looks like a problem with the SATA connector within my notebook, but it shouldn't be case as the hdd sits tight and the old one still works. Moreover I tried to change SATA settings in BIOS from "AHCI" to "Compatibility" in case of a driver fault, but this also didn't fix the issue.
For now I have connected the new hard drive with the SATA2USB adaptor and do some writing on it via dd. In this case, the errors do not occur at all.
The disk now gives me errors even if connected via USB. So I assume it is a hardware defect. The Western Digital Drive Check tools won't boot, but, I think these errors are more or less unambiguous
[ 268.018935] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 77649
[ 268.018938] lost page write due to I/O error on sdb
[ 268.226335] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled sense code
[ 268.226340] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
[ 268.226345] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : 0x3 [current]
[ 268.226350] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] ASC=0xc ASCQ=0x0
[ 268.226355] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: cdb[0]=0x2a: 2a 00 00 09 7b 30 00 00 f0 00
[ 268.226366] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 621360
[ 268.434722] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled sense code
[ 268.434732] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
[ 268.434740] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : 0x3 [current]
[ 268.434748] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] ASC=0xc ASCQ=0x0
[ 268.434756] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: cdb[0]=0x2a: 2a 00 00 09 7c 20 00 00 f0 00
[ 268.434775] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 621600
[ 268.642711] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled sense code
[ 268.642718] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
[ 268.642723] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : 0x3 [current]
[ 268.642728] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] ASC=0xc ASCQ=0x0
[ 268.642733] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: cdb[0]=0x2a: 2a 00 00 09 7d 10 00 00 f0 00
[ 268.642744] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 621840
[ 268.849950] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled sense code
[ 268.849956] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
[ 268.849961] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : 0x3 [current]
[ 268.849967] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] ASC=0xc ASCQ=0x0
[ 268.849971] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: cdb[0]=0x2a: 2a 00 00 09 7e 00 00 00 f0 00
[ 268.850004] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 622080
[ 269.057592] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled sense code
[ 269.057598] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
[ 269.057603] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Sense Key : 0x3 [current]
[ 269.057608] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] ASC=0xc ASCQ=0x0
[ 269.057612] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: cdb[0]=0x2a: 2a 00 00 09 7e f0 00 00 f0 00
[ 269.057624] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 622320
[ 299.466711] usb 1-1: reset high speed USB device number 3 using ehci_hcd
[ 329.760049] usb 1-1: reset high speed USB device number 3 using ehci_hcd
[ 354.454537] usb 1-1: USB disconnect, device number 3
[ 354.458395] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Unhandled error code
[ 354.458404] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] Result: hostbyte=0x01 driverbyte=0x00
[ 354.458412] sd 2:0:0:0: [sdb] CDB: cdb[0]=0x2a: 2a 00 00 09 7f e0 00 00 f0 00
[ 354.458431] end_request: I/O error, dev sdb, sector 622560
[ 354.458446] quiet_error: 170 callbacks suppressed
[ 354.458451] Buffer I/O error on device sdb, logical block 77820
For the sake of completeness, here are the SMART values:
smartctl 5.40 2010-02-03 r3060 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-10 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Device Model: WDC WD5000BUDT-63G8FY0
Firmware Version: 01.01A01
User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes
Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall]
ATA Version is: 8
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Sun Jul 10 09:44:26 2011 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled
=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity
was never started.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: (13560) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
General Purpose Logging supported.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 158) minutes.
Conveyance self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x7031) SCT Status supported.
SCT Feature Control supported.
SCT Data Table supported.
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 189 185 021 Pre-fail Always - 1541
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 54
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 16
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 253 000 Old_age Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 50
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 36
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 164
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 111 105 000 Old_age Always - 36
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]
SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
It is regardless which kernel version I use (latest ARCH 2.6.39 or 2.6.23 from a grml live system), the error is persistent everywhere.
I will just send it back for warranty. In fact, it's another prove for today's harddisk "quality"
EDITED: 1. forgot some detail in dmesg; 2. Finally got it
Last edited by fixje (2011-07-10 11:35:06)

We call it case or drive hum. And it seems like a harmonic clash of two devices, or the 2nd hard drive causing the case itself (metal case).
There are shock absorbent washers on the side metal door.
Drive is attached and firmly installed and the latch on the back is securely in down and lock position.
And of course it still happens.
Me, I'd pull the old inefficient 250GB drive with 8MB cache, the Seagate 7200.9s that some shipped with were horrible performance and noise).
What I do with drive is run it through WD Lifeguard in Windows a couple times (Extended Test, full format instead of quick).
Some people sought out drive sled anti-vibration washers to fit to the sled (can't change the height though in order to fit properly).
Turn off "allow drives to spin down when not in use" if on.

Hard Drive I/O Errors

Hi,
I've bought a new iMac G5 2.0 17" about two months ago. It worked fine for the first month and then started to hangup randomly for a few minutes. I can move the mouse cursor but it shows the spinning "beachball" but the computer stays frozen .. After a few minutes everything is back to normal.. I noticed that I have the following error messages in the system.log after the hangup occures: "/dev/disk0s3: I/O Error" .. I thought it's dying hard drive, so I backed up the whole system to my external firewire drive, reinstalled Tiger on the internal drive (with complete format and zeroing the drive) and contionued using the computer.. It seemed OK for a few days until last night.I was browsing the internet and at the same time iTunes was running when the computer hung up again .. only this time it remained frozen fo about 40 minutes. I've had to reset it by holding the power button.. After the restart it won't boot from the internal hard drive anymore.. It goes to the at the gray screen with the spinning circle and stays there forever.
I booted from my backup firewire hard drive and checked the internal drive using Disk Utility's First Aid.. after a few checks Disk Utility reported that the disk was repaired.Anyway the iMac still couldn't boot from it.. I also experienced the same hangup and the same error showed in the system.log while running from the firewire hard drive: "/dev/disk1s11: I/O Error" (disk1s11 is my firewire harddrive). So the issue couldn't be hard drive related... I ran Apple Hardware Test several times and it reports everything is OK. I'm new to Macs so I don't know what to do at this point. Should I send the computer for repair? Or could this be a software related issue?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Seems as the harddisk of my new 20" imac just passed away. Does not show up, neither from diskutility nor diskwarrior, and there's this very ugly sound from the harddisk that definitely shows something is wrong. The apple hardware test showed no problems though… This must be a new record, I have had to reinstall the system at least 5 times, initialize the disk two times, and now there's nothing to initialize anymore. All of it in less than two months (this being the second iMac they send me, the first one had a defective superdrive).
Apple support, here we go again

External Hard Drive Input/Output error

I recently started having problems with an external hard drive setup that I did not have problems with prior to upgrading to 10.5.5 and trying to setup the drive to be compatible with Time Machine.
The hard drive enclosure that I have has 2 bays for two SATA drives. I have used this enclosure without any problems until I tried to get 1 drive to act as the backup drive for Time Machine and the other to be storage. I formatted them using Drive Genius. I used the option for GUILD or GUIL which it said was the better format for using with Time Machine.
The first problem I ran into since upgrading and reformatting the drives is I got an "input/output" error the first couple times I connected the drive via USB to my Mac. I could still use the drives but I got weird errors every once in a while like "input/output error" or "device was not ejected properly" even though the device had not been unplugged.
Now the drives will not mount using OS 10.5.5. The drives show up when I open Disk Utility, but I cannot get them to mount. I have ran Disk Utility First Aid, and it says the drives are fine. There is one error that shows up when I run the "Repair Disk" feature. It reads "Invalid content in Journal". But Disk Utility also says "The volume was repaired successfully".
I have seen some posts when I do a search in google about this issue and it seems this is a known issue. Every suggestion I see says to insert your Tiger DVD and reformat the drive using that and the problem will be solved. The only problem with that is I have a lot of important files on the drive that I cannot lose. I had the files backed up until I moved them to the new drive a while back. Now I do not have a backup because I was in the process of switching to bigger drives and erased the old drives after doing so because everything was working fine.
I am hoping someone out there may have some suggestions (other than erasing the drive) to get my dives to mount so I can transfer the data off to another drive and reformat after.
Thanks,
Paul Rugg

Thanks for the suggestion.
Do you think that would work better than Drive Genius? I bought Drive Genius 2 and it does not even see the drives when they are plugged in unlike Disc Utility which can see the drives but cannot mount either one.
Maybe this following post I made to a different questions may help. The data on the drive is other buying another program for if it will work. I think my next step may be to go over to a friends place and try to mount the drives on his computer and transfer stuff off if they connect.
text below posted to other question relating to external hard drive problem.
I have recently had the same mounting issue with my new external hard drive. I just purchased a new 750Gb Western Digital Sata drive and got everything transfered over to it. Immediately, I got an error saying that the drive had been ejected incorrectly even though it was still plugged in. I was a little curious. I restarted the computer (hard drive still plugged in via USB 2.0) and the drive showed up just fine. I plugged another 250Gb drive into the same case (2 bays) and the 250GB drive showed up just fine.
Well, I then noticed there was an OS upgrade available when I ran Software update so i ran it and when I rebooted the drives were gone. I can see the drives in Disc Utility, but they will not mount. Drive Genius cannot see either disc. Disc Utility says I need to repair the drives, but when I do it says they are fixed but they don not mount.
The problem really seems to be related to mounting USB external drives. I got ahold of 2 seperate external firewire hard drives and one shows up just fine while the other has the same problem (both work on other systems. I would try wiping the drives and reformatting but ALL MY stuff is on them and not everything has been backed up. Yuck! I have not tried connecting my hard drive to another Mac yet.
The drives being used are #1 Maxtor Maxline Plus II 250GB SATA/150 HDD 1.5b/s 7Y250m00654ra
and #2 Western Digital WD7500AACS WD Caviar GP Green Power drive.
I have another post similar to this and I have not received any feedback, but I have been doing my own searching and have found similar posts on the net.
Anybody have any clue what might be going on here? It really seems to be related to my upgrade.

Time Machine - External Hard Drive Read only error

Just recently got a Iomega 1TB MiniMax FireWire 800 USB 2.0 Desktop Hard Drive and used Time Machine to backup my computer. This was my first time using Time Machine and it successfully backed up 350 GBs. It continued to do backups every hour. When I turned my computer off and then turned it on the next day Time Machine wouldn't allow me to do a backup because it said the hard drive was read only. When I checked info it said it was read/write. I used disc utility to verify disc it said it could not verify disc do a disc repair. Disc repair failed and it said reformat disc. I erased the hard drive tried again and I got the same error message. The hard drive is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I searched this forum and the trouble shooting links and couldn't find anything on how to correct this. Any help on this problem would be appreciated.

See the following:
What to do if Time Machine reports you don't have permission
This was posted in the Apple Discussions by V.K. I have only modified it slightly to be more generic.
The problem seems to be that 10.5.6 changes permissions on a file so that even the root user doesn't have write peivileges. I have no idea why they did this. The workaround suggested in [an]other post will probably work, too, but i did something less drastic. Instead of deleting the file I changed permissions on it, and it worked just fine. An added benefit is that the permission change seems to stick, so you don't have to delete the file every time you change a drive.
[Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt [enter] the following command:
sudo chmod 644 /volumes/"TM drive name"/.xxxxxxxxxxxx
The name of the file .xxxxxxxxxxxx is based on the MAC address of your computer and will be different for every computer. Put the name of the TM drive in the above and keep the quotes.
You'll have to enter your admin password (which you won't see) which is normal.
This was edited by Kappy just for cleanup.
Enable Finder to Show Invisible Files and Folders
Open the Terminal application in your Utilities folder. At the prompt enter or paste the following command line then press RETURN.
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
To turn off the display of invisible files and folders enter or paste the following command line and press RETURN.
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles FALSE
Alternatively you can use one of the numerous third-party utilities such as TinkerTool or ShowHideInvisibleFiles - VersionTracker or MacUpdate.
Also, see User Tips for Time Machine for help with TM problems. Also you can select Mac Help from the Finder's Help menu and search for "time machine" to locate articles on how to use TM. See also Mac 101- Time Machine.
Message was edited by: Kappy

I get error 8062 when trying to copy files from one external hard drive to another. It starts out copying files, but after 10 minutes or so it stops and I get the error 8062. The hard drive tech support says the problem is in my Macbook Air.

I cannot copy my doc and photos and videos from one external hard drive to a second external hard drive -- both plugged in to my MacBook Air -- I get Error 8062 and the copying (which seemed to be going on for 10 minutes) stops and nothing gets copied.
As any Macbook Air owner knows, there is SO LITTLE storage capacity on the computer that you have to back up big files onto an external hard drive to avoid getting the other annoying error that says you have no more memory/storage capacity/whatever the proper term is, and you cannot use the computer.
Backstory: Before this error cropped up, I had backed up lots of files to an external drive and then removed them from my computer. But then the external hard drive got corrupted and I could not access my entire photo library. Had to pay $850 to Kroll Ontrack to recover those files. I have now bought 2 new external 1 Terrabyte hard drives as protection against another such disaster. BUT I cannot copy the files from the first hard drive where all my reovered files now sit, to another backup hard drive.
Feeling vulnerable. Please help.
SusaninNY

From the menu bar, select
 ▹ System Preferences ▹ Energy Saver ▹ Power Adapter
and uncheck the box labeled Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible, if it's checked.
If the drive has more than one interface (USB, FireWire, Thunderbolt, eSATA), try one of the other interfaces.
Check that the data cable is securely inserted at both ends.
Try a different cable.
If you're connecting the drive through a hub, connect it directly to a built-in port on the Mac.
If you're connecting it directly, try a different port.
Disconnect all other devices on the bus, or as many as possible.
Test the drive with another Mac. Test another drive with this Mac.
If the drive is bus-powered, but has an AC adapter, connect the adapter.
Start up in Safe Mode and test.
If the drive doesn't work under any of the above conditions, and if another drive does work with the same Mac, then the drive has failed. You may be able to salvage the mechanism by removing it from the enclosure and installing it in another one, or in a drive dock.

Problems copying files from an external hard drive to MacBook (error code 36)

A little while ago I backed up some files on my iMac to an external hard drive (formatted in the Mac format). These were primarily office documents (PDF files, Microsoft Office) and some photos. The documents had orignally been copied to my iMac from a PC (via USB), whilst the photos were imported directly to the iMac. Having brought a MacBook Pro recently, I've been attempting to copy the data over. Unfortunately, I keep getting error code 36 when it attempts to copy the files over. I've tried skipping some of the files it gets stuck on, but it keeps finding more. This also happens when I am just trying to copy over a folder of photos. Another unusual thing that I noticed is that when I try to copy a folder containing just under 300 files, when it attempts to copy it says it is trying to write 1,500+ files... which I don't quite understand.
I've run the disk utility tool to check the hard drive, but it says it's fine. Prior to copying the data over to the external hard drive in the first place, it had been freshly formatted. Unfortunately, since this was the backup disk, I kinda need to save these files!
Does anyone know of any solutions out there that could help?

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ If you’re running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the page that opens.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Try the action again. Post any messages that appear in the Console window – the text, please, not a screenshot.
Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Edit it out by search-and-replace in a text editor before posting.

Hard drive i/o error, spinning beachballs. PASSES Smart test, but fails two specific parameters:

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