* Help! Disk Utility is Telling Me...

"This disk needs to be repaired using the Recovery HD. Restart your computer, holding down the Command key and the R key until you see the Apple logo. When the Mac OS X Utilities window appears, choose Disk Utility."
Does this mean that I will lose all data on my HD?
How should I go about backing up my HD?
Thanks in advance!
BTW, running OS 10.7.3

Hold Command and r keys and boot into Lion  Recovery and use Disk Utility to repair the drive, if it's fixed then no problem.
If Disk Utility can't fix the drive, there are ways to get the data off as long as the drive is operational.
Easiest is to boot directly and transfer User files manually to a storage drive as quickly as possible,
 Most commonly used backup methods explained
but if OS X isn't booting, you can employ these Data Recovery steps
another Mac via Firewire Target Disk Mode, OS X installed on a external drive, etc. etc.
 Data recovery efforts explained
https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents
Right from Lion Recovery you can Zero Erase and format a external powered blank hard drive GUID, OS X Extended
then install Lion on it from Apple's servers, reboot holding the option key down and choose the external to boot from
then setup with the same name and access your internal drive to recover files.
If that fails, there is always DataRescue $99 to read the 1's and 0's of any files on the drive (no filevault of course)

Similar Messages

  • Help: Disk Utility: Disks need to be repaired

    My MacBook Pro lately has been extremely slow and just constantly thinking and freezing.
    I ran the Disk Utility to verify the disk and this is what came up:
    "This disk needs to be repaired using the Recovery HD.  Restart your computer, holding down the command key and the R key until you see the Apple Logo.  When the OS C Utilities Window appears choose disk utility."
    So I did this step and went to repair it.  But when I said repair disk, it said that the disk seems to be Okay.
    Why does it say that?  How can I fix my computer, or do I need to go to the Apple Store.  Please Help.
    Thanks

    Looking at your top screenshot:
    That appears to be the NETWORK version of Disk Utility.
    From this I conclude your Internal Hard Drive was seen as failing, and it would not boot to the Recovery_HD partition on the Internal Hard Drive, and went for the Online/Network version of Recovery_HD (from the Internet) instead.
    I think you should take it in for service and expect that they are likely to replace the Hard Drive and give it back to you with a new drive with ONLY Mac OS X (no user files) installed.
    AppleCare warranty and SSD:
    Like most warranties, AppleCare covers defects in materials and workmanship. They will replace like-with-like, that is: they will give you the same drive or a slightly better one. I suggest you have it fixed and take advantage of whatever they will give you under warranty.
    Apple does not sell the 2.5" form factor SATA SSD notebook drives that would just fit into the same space as your internal drive. These are very popular with upgraders, and users find they are somewhat faster, run cooler, and allow the battery to last longer. You can always replace the spinning internal drive later with one more to your liking, and run the old one in an external enclosure for more on-desk storage.
    You do not void your warranty by installing an aftermarket drive such as an SSD, but the actual new drive would not be covered under the Apple warranty. (many Vendors warrant the drive separately for at least a year, sometimes longer).

  • Help ,Disk utility does not allow me to partition my internal HD

    hello , i want to partition my internal hard drive but for some reason disk utility does not allow me to , when i click on the partition window everything is greyed out, i read on other thread that file vault might be the problem but is already off , i can t figure out what the issue is any ideas ??? here is a screenshot.

    Not if you want to be able to restore the Boot Camp partition using Boot Camp Assistant. There are alternative boot loaders you can use to add Windows and Linux to an OS X drive. You would first need to restore your drive by deleting the Boot Camp partition you now have. Then take a look at The rEFInd Boot Manager: Getting rEFInd - Roderick W. Smith.

  • Wife about to give birth and Disk Utility failing to repair HD.

    Good morning. Starting last night I began having serious issues with my 2007 20" 2.4ghz iMac. I hope someone can help before I employ the "nuke" option.
    First a little background. My wife is about to give birth to our second child. I have several in-laws in town and my house is a wreck. So, last night I thought it would be a great time to upgrade my iPhone 3G to iOS 4. I am not implying that updating my phone caused the problems with my iMac but they started about 30 seconds after pushing the "Update" button in iTunes.
    The phone did update to iOS 4 after about 3 hours of backing up but immediately the iMac started "hanging up" and the spinning beach ball appeared for minutes at a time. late last night after my iPhone was functioning again, I went to bed.
    This morning, the iMac was still responding very slowly and I was getting the spinning beach ball for even longer periods of time. So, I rebooted the machine and upon reboot the iMac would get stuck on the grey screen with the Apple logo and a spinning gear.
    I tried all of the methods on this support document.
    http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2570
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    After booting from the Install DVD and running Disk Utility, Disk Utility was telling me that almost the entire HD is available and that it could not repair the disk. I was receiving "Invalid Node Structure" and "Volume Check Failed" error messages.
    So the last thing the support document suggested was a complete erase and re-install. I have been running Time Machine, but have never actually used it to recover anything, much less the 1000s of photos and 1000s of songs on the iMac.
    Is there anything else I can or should try before pulling the plug and erasing the hard drive and praying that Time Machine has worked?
    My very pregnant wife will have a heart attack if we lost everything on the computer. (I really am not joking that she might go into labor any second, her due date was last week.)
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    I know that I am a bother and asking alot of questions in quick succession, but I am hoping to take care of this before the baby makes its appearance.
    I'm getting you have a lot on your mind right now, try not to not worry about it. Might be time to take a few deep breaths and try to relax.
    If you have had your machine connected to Time Machine and it has been doing backups (I'm sure it has been) you have done everything necessary.
    You can attempt an erase and restore however if your disk is dodgy or has failed at best it's a temporary solution. As I stated I would recommend taking it into an AASP and have it looked at.

  • Trouble with Fantom drive / Disk Utility won't erase it

    Until a few days ago, i had no problems with my Fantom 160 GB titanium drive. Then when i connected it to a freind's Mac, it started out OK fora few minutes, when my brother was playing around with creating an air network between the friend's computer, to which my fantom drive was attached, and my laptop. When i tried to activate the network, the Mac semi froze for a few minutes and just didn't do anything. when it started to move again, the fantom drive was showing 0 files in the finder window, and wouldn't eject.
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    Since i wouldn't lose too much data, i had no problem reinitializing the drive, but Disk Utility kept telling me that the erase failed.
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    This is the same text i get when i try to erase the drive, but without the error number.
    I see at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302411 that this message this is bad, as Disk Utility cannot fix it.
    Currently, the drive does not show up on the desktop, but it does show up in Disk Utilities. It stopped telling me the drive is unreadable.
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    Dale,
    that post is helpful, but I'm not sure how much it applies to me. My ibook shows no problems when not connected to the firewire drive, while the firewire drive started acting up when connected to another computer. i have also not been able to get the firewire drive to work on two other macs. The Fantom drive showed up as unreadable on all three, and Disk Utilities on all 3 computers failed to erase the firewire drive. By brother's had Disk Warrior & it wasn't able to do anything for the fantom drive, either.

  • Verify Disk - Disk Utility problems

    I am having problems repairing my disk and receive the following:
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    Performing live verification.
    Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
    Checking Extents Overflow file.
    Checking Catalog file.
    Incorrect number of thread records
    Incorrect number of thread records
    Checking multi-linked files.
    Checking Catalog hierarchy.
    Checking Extended Attributes file.
    Checking volume bitmap.
    Checking volume information.
    The volume iMac HD needs to be repaired.
    Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
    Any thoughts out there?

    Hi mrlou;
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  • Disk utility recomends backing up files after hard drive can not be repaired?

    My Mac mini will not complete the boot process. I am able to get to the disk utility by using the Snow Lepard disk that I recently purchased and pressing the option key. Disk utility is telling be that my disk can not be repaired and I should back up as much data as I can and reload the software.
    Is there another disk repair program that could possibly fix what disk utility can not? Is it worth a try?
    If not...
    How do I back up data on the mounted disk since I can not access it? Do you recommend a perticular external hard drive and software to manage my backups?
    Thank you.

    Welcome to Apple Support Communities allensood!
    You will get a wider audience and won't confuse the original poster with solutions that don't apply to them, if you start your own topic here
    https://discussions.apple.com/community/desktop_computers/mac_mini?view=discussi ons
    Unless you have a solution to try for the original poster, it is always best if you start your own topic.

  • Copying a drive with Disk Utility

    I have a USB drive used for Time Machine that is failing. Disk Utility says it can't fix it, but says I can copy files from it.
    I attached a new drive and am using Disk Utility's "Restore" function to clone the new drive from the failing one (both are 1TB drives).
    Disk Utility says on the screen that it is "copying blocks". Does this mean it's doing an image copy rather than a file-by-file copy? It seems to me an image copy in this case might be bad, because it could cause any file or directory corruption on the old drive to be copied to the new drive.
    Are my worries justified? Would I be better off just using the Finder to copy files? Are there third-party programs that might be better? (DiskWarrior says it can't fix the old drive because of insufficient memory.)

    I have SuperDuper! but didn't have it installed on that machine and thought I would give the Disk Utility process a try.
    I'm fairly sure SuperDuper! must use file copying, not image copying, and I suspect Disk Utility does too. But that "copying blocks" message made me wonder.
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  • Disk Utility doesn't run from installation dvd.....

    hi there:)
    i ran a scheduled maintenance check using Onyx. It turned out that the disk could not be verified and it had to be fixed by inserting the installation dvd and running 'disk utility'. i inserted the dvd and ran the 'disk utility', however, it quit unexpectedly. the following message came up:
    Process: Disk Utility [417]
    Path: /Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility
    Identifier: com.apple.DiskUtility
    Version: 10.5.8 (198.16)
    Build Info: DiskUtility-1981600~17
    Code Type: X86 (Native)
    Parent Process: launchd [172]
    Date/Time: 2008-12-28 12:28:49.499 +0000
    OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.6 (9G55)
    Report Version: 6
    Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
    Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
    Crashed Thread: 0
    Dyld Error Message:
    Symbol not found: __commpagedsmos
    Referenced from: /Volumes/Mac OS X Install Disc 1/Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app/Contents/MacOS/Disk Utility
    Expected in: /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib
    i really want to know what to do to save my mac book!
    please help
    regards,
    rik

    Rik,
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    Some background info that may be helpful:
    Disk Utility (& all such disk utilities) must temporarily "unmount" a disk to affect a repair of its file system (which is what the "Repair Disk" step does). Unmounting a disk makes it unavailable for normal use. The disk containing the operating system that is currently running the computer (the startup disk) cannot be unmounted. This is why the "Repair Disk" button is grayed out if you run Disk Utility with your startup disk as its target.
    Repairing permissions does not require unmounting the disk but it does require a healthy file system, which is why the disk repair must precede it. Apple recommends repairing permissions on the start up disk while booted from it, which is why it should be done after restarting normally.
    The verify steps do not actually repair anything. They just run the checks that the repair steps run to determine if any repairs are needed & report the results of those checks.
    The routine that repairs permissions is part of the OS itself. Disk Utility, Onyx, & all other such utilities that repair permissions actually just tell the OS to perform this routine. Thus, it doesn't matter which one you use to do this repair, nor is one utility any better than another at doing this. So if you prefer, after restarting after doing the disk repair from the install disk you can do the permissions repair with Onyx.

  • RAID drive is listed as "failed" in disk utility - how to fix it ?

    hello all. I set up a RAID with two LaCie 250GB drives about two months ago and have been using it to handle my itunes library and some back up files. It was working fine but launched disk utility the other day i looked at the mirrored raid and it said it was "degraded" and that one of the drives has failed. The first question is how do i fix the situation - do i need to "rebuild" the drive through disk utility ? and if so will i loose info or since it is mirrored, the other drive will simply overwrite it with the redundant information ? I was just intimidated by the warning after clicking the rebuild button...that my drive will be wiped. I have looked and some suggest I restart, plug unplug the firewire, etc and i have doen all of that.
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    See Disk Utility->Help->Disk Utility Help->A disk in a RAID set has failed or is missing.

  • Disk Utility Guide

    Where can I find a nice/complete guide to the DISK UTILITY APP of OS X 10.8 or 10.9?
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    Disk Utility->Help->Disk Utility help.

  • Creating RAID5 with Disk Utility?

    I have three new 4TB drives and wanted to set them up in my old MacPro (Early2008) as RAID5. This should give me 8TB with one redundant disk. However, I don't see a RAID5 option in Apple Disk Utility (Version 13, in OS X 10.10.1).
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    Disk Utility does not do RAID 5. And there is serious question about whether anyone should be using RAID 5.
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  • I can't delete partition in disk utility, it keeps telling me that "the changes are too small"

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    Make at least two complete backups of all your data. Boot from another drive and partition this one as desired. Restore the data.

  • So I recently removed my partition so I can repartition but its telling me to do something with the disk utility I don't understand what I'm suppose to do?

    So I recently removed my partition so I can repartition but its telling me to do something with the disk utility I don't understand what I'm suppose to do?

    GCapinpin wrote:
    So I recently removed my partition so I can repartition but its telling me to do something with the disk utility I don't understand what I'm suppose to do?
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  • Help needed. I have a 3TB external hard drive partitioned into 1TB's. I used one partition as backup for the main computer hard drive. But now it is greyed out as shown in the disk utility and its name changed, i dont know how that happened, i tried verif

    Help needed. I have a 3TB external hard drive partitioned into 1TB's. I used one partition as backup for the main computer hard drive. But now it is greyed out as shown in the disk utility and its name changed, i dont know how that happened, i tried verifying and repairing it but had no luck. I also tried mounting and unmounting it but still no solution. Anyone to help please?

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    See http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/

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