Hard Drive "Input Output" Error When Attempting to Format

A friend just gave me a nice PowerBook that seems to be in need of a fresh OS and when attempting to format the hard drive I am getting an "Input Output" error. Any suggestions to overcome this issue and format the drive?

Hi all,
I'm having similar issues on a white macbook (2006 model). I ran into some trouble with it about a month ago, when on booting up, it showed only the folder with a question mark. Booting up from the original grey install DVD worked, so I thought the problem was most likely a faulty hard drive.
It's only after having this problem, that I came across this recall for possible faulty hard drives, that Apple offered:
http://www.apple.com/support/macbook/hd/repairextension/
Doh! Too late?
So, I got onto ebay and picked up a deal and received my new hard drive yesterday. I swapped out the original 80GB with 320GB, only to find the same input/output error described by the OP, here (also in a couple of other Apple discussion posts - see below).
Disk utility shows the new hard drive to be 2.3TB in size! Should be 320GB - but, this is also what others have described. See e.g.,:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16090313#16090313
I've run the extended testing from the CD (holding down 'D' on boot-up) and it reported no problems. Also, similar to others experiences:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16081818#16081818
So, what can the problem be?!?!?!?!?
In this post, JMPC suggests it has something to do with the size of the new internal hard drive....groan.....:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16145560?tstart=0#16145560?tstart=0
Can anyone confirm this?

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Disk Utility "Input - Output error" when attempting to erase Hard Drive

Hope that someone can point me in the right direction.
I bought an external hard drive for Windows a year back and loaded music onto it. I realized that I my MAC wasn't getting "Read / Write" privileges for the External Hard Drive, so I decided to try to Partition it and make it into a FAT readable device. It erased all data from my hard drive, but Disk Utility stopped the process and displayed an "input - output error".
Consequently, I can't initialize the external hard drive to make it usable on my MAC.
Can anyone point me in the right direction so I can "reformat" my external?
Thanks!

Hi all,
I'm having similar issues on a white macbook (2006 model). I ran into some trouble with it about a month ago, when on booting up, it showed only the folder with a question mark. Booting up from the original grey install DVD worked, so I thought the problem was most likely a faulty hard drive.
It's only after having this problem, that I came across this recall for possible faulty hard drives, that Apple offered:
http://www.apple.com/support/macbook/hd/repairextension/
Doh! Too late?
So, I got onto ebay and picked up a deal and received my new hard drive yesterday. I swapped out the original 80GB with 320GB, only to find the same input/output error described by the OP, here (also in a couple of other Apple discussion posts - see below).
Disk utility shows the new hard drive to be 2.3TB in size! Should be 320GB - but, this is also what others have described. See e.g.,:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16090313#16090313
I've run the extended testing from the CD (holding down 'D' on boot-up) and it reported no problems. Also, similar to others experiences:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16081818#16081818
So, what can the problem be?!?!?!?!?
In this post, JMPC suggests it has something to do with the size of the new internal hard drive....groan.....:
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16145560?tstart=0#16145560?tstart=0
Can anyone confirm this?

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.

Input/output error when attempting to restore external HDD?

I have an old 1TB external HDD that corrupted a while ago, the drive still mounts and i can still see the files inside the drive, unfortunately opening the drive up crashes finder. As i have another 2TB external drive, my next idea was to create a second partition in my 2TB drive and then restore the old 1TB drive into the second partition of the 2TB drive using the disk utility. After a few minutes it comes up with the error message INPUT/OUTPUT error and then stops restoring it.
Any ideas folks as to where to go from here? what the problem might be? or what to try next?
many thanks
Ali

Ali,
your external 1 TB HDD might have a hardware fault which is preventing access to its files. Have you tried running your MacBook Pro’s Apple Hardware Test, to see if it can detect a hardware-related problem with your external 1 TB HDD?

SOLVED: Getting an Input/Output error when accessing certain files

My system started failing a few days ago because of sudden Input/Output errors when trying to access certain files. It was running fine until various applications started crashing like for example Pidgin (in retrospect probably because of DBus crashing). I decided to reboot and now can't login anymore because the DBus module fails to load which in turn means that HAL doesn't load either and so I can't use my keyboard to login.
The error message I get from DBus is that it can't access the file /etc/dbus-1/system.d/org.freedesktop.PolicyKit.conf because of an Input/Output error. I tried to fix/see what was wrong using the arch livecd. Because I thought my problem had to do with a pacman update that had failed before I'd rebooted, I updated my system and I noticed that when pacman tried to access other files it came back with the same error message. The files seemed pretty random, one of them was fakeroot.conf and then several library files like libfaad (sorry this is kind of vague but I'm away from home right now and can't go online very often so I'm writing this from memory).
I'm guessing its a hard drive problem because checking the filesystem for errors came back with nothing. I was just wondering whether anyone had any other ideas before I go and reinstall. I'm going back home tomorrow so I'll be able to follow any advice/reinstall then.
Last edited by siell (2010-04-08 17:01:37)

UPDATE
It seems to be fixed! The second run of e2fsck fixed some more issues and the files that were causing the problems earlier seemed to have bad inodes. Boots fine now and I can get into my system. I checked and I still have a reasonable amount of free space so I don't think that was the reason ... I have no idea how the filesystem got so corrupted out of nowhere.
A few things are different, for example, it asked me to unlock the keyring and I couldn't mount my external encrypted drive anymore and had to do it manually with cryptsetup. e2fsck made quite a few changes so I imagine it's due to that. Shouldn't be to hard to fix though.
Thanks for your help!

Can't acces to internal laptop hard disc - input/output error

Sometimes when I use my i can't acces to any file on my hdd and i get input/output error when i type commands in console(i even can't halt or reboot). This is used to happen suddenly after few hour of work in one session (not always, it happend three times during last week)
When i get this error the hdd control led is on (I have ibm x60s with ssd hard disc, and normaly this diod only blink sometimes, bbut when i get this error , diod is the whole time floodlite. I didn't any similar problem in google so i posted it here.

Welcome to the forums.
Not exactly alot of info to go on here. Try reading up on the "How to post" article on the wiki.
As for the trouble at hand. With the limited info given, I'd say start off with running some health checks on your disk (smartctl, fsck,...).
Last edited by Gcool (2012-03-29 05:23:32)

Input/output error when installing CS6 on my MacBook Air 10.10 Yosemite

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sounds like you have a damaged cd.
Downloadable installation files available:
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Photoshop Elements: 13 |12 | 11, 10 | 9,8,7
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Input/output errors on trying to format a new hard drive

I just installed a Western Digital 160 GB hard drive to replace the original 80 GB drive in my 1.67 Hi-res G4 PB. I can boot from an external FW hard drive that has a copy of the original made with SuperDuper - seems to run fine.
The new 160 GB drive shows up in System Profiler and in the Disk Utility list of drives on the left side of the window - which make me think that I did the hardware installation correctly as the drive can be seen by the system. Maybe this isn't so.
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The computer ran fine with the old 80 GB hard drive - no sign of any problems - I just need the space.
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Hi, I installed a 160GB HD WDC (WD1600BEVE-00UYT0) for the previous one didn't work anymore.
After a month it began to freeze and I had to reset the pb, After a few days (and a lot of resetting) I had to reset the PB and the PRAM. After some more days (and a lot of PB and PRAM resettings) I had to reset the PMU, the PRAM, and the PB. After some more days (and ALL the resettings) I had to open the pb, disconnect the HD, re-connect it, and it did work again fine.
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Input / Output Error when creating GUID Partition on External Drives

I've been trying to setup an install of OS X on an external device and therefore need to partition them to the GUID Partition Scheme.
I've tried it with my iPod and an External Hard Disk Drive and no matter what I do, I get the error:
Exited with Error: Input / Output Error
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Disk Utility - Input/Output error when creating disk image

Hello!
A few days ago I was unable to turn on my Macbook Pro, and was stuck on the white screen. I've been searching around quite a lot on this forum, and before I try fixing anything, I REALLY need to back-up my files! I just bought a 2TB hard-drive, which I have partitioned to GUID and Mac OS Extended (Journaled), (it perfectly works on another Mac).
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I can only access Disk Utility through pressing command+R when starting my computer. Hence, I need to successfully back up my files through Disk Utility...
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Thanks for your answer.
Yes, I thought that might be the case - but I'd taken my Mac and Logic disks to a Genius bar, and the 'Genius' had said he'd fixed the issue. I just wish he'd explained what he did and why he didn't replace the faulty disk(s)!
But is there any way around having the claim a disk, now I'm living abroad and my 'warrantee' has run out? It's going to be a pain in the fundament trying to claim a replacement set.

Input/output error when performing CP

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stingray wrote:
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"input/output error' when making disc image from DVD

I've had problems installing Logic, and a Pro Apps Genius at Applecare suggested I try making an image of the problematic DVD (Audio Content 1) and then trying an install that way.
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Thanks for your answer.
Yes, I thought that might be the case - but I'd taken my Mac and Logic disks to a Genius bar, and the 'Genius' had said he'd fixed the issue. I just wish he'd explained what he did and why he didn't replace the faulty disk(s)!
But is there any way around having the claim a disk, now I'm living abroad and my 'warrantee' has run out? It's going to be a pain in the fundament trying to claim a replacement set.

Hard Drive "Input Output" Error When Attempting to Format

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