Needs help earsing disk!

so today after i did the upgrade i found my self unable to turn on my mac (stuck on the booting screen with the apple logo and the spinning wheel) i tried to repair the disk in disk utility but was unable to do so(could not be fixed back up as many files as possible and reformat) but when i try to erase the HD the message :unable to unmount disk was displayed what should i do? please help!!!

Boot into your Recovery partition (holding down the Command and R keys whilst booting) and you should be able to use Disk Utility to erase and format your boot partition. You're then going to want to install (I hope) a clean version of OS X onto the drive. Just be aware that you will lose all data on the drive.
Or is that what you tried? And got the message that the disk could not be repaired? If so, you're just going to have to take your machine to your local Apple Store or an AASP and have them replace the drive.
Clinton

Similar Messages

NEED HELP! Disk Utility mixed up HD and erased 2TB of data!

I just encountered a disaster thanks to disk utility and am asking for your help. PLEASEEEEEEE
Details: MacBook Pro using Lion OSX
Here is the short story. Like any semi-computer nerd, I have a lot of external harddrives for all my work. One was having issues and showed symptoms of a break down. So I backed-up everything on the drive and tried to reformat it. Half-way through, disk utility seemed to get stuck or something. The bar did not progress, and the estimated time to complete continued to go up. After about two hours, I needed to grab some files off another harddrive. No big deal. I left the harddrive being reformatted still plugged in, so the process would continue undisturbed. In the second USB port, I plugged in an expansion port with 2 other external harddrives connected to it. ...Within seconds, literally seconds, diskutility erased one of the new harddrives and renamed it. I'm not kidding. It happened so fast, I couldn't stop it. It worked faster then I've ever seen DiskUtility erase a drive…10…20 seconds max. I lost 2 terrabits of files. Information, files and personal documents that cannot be replaced. This is a huge disaster!
Is there anyway to fix this? Is the restore image feature in disk utility bring back files? Worst of all, there is no reasonable argument for why disk utility mixed it up. I never unplugged the drive it was reformating. I never touched the program or clicked anything. And how did it mix them up? You have to select the drive explicitly that you want to erase. One was a Western Digital HD and the other aSeagate, both with different names, models and serial numbers. Computers don't simply mix up drives. It's coded. Second, how could it erase the drive so fast? It never even mounted. By the time the new drive appeared, it was already erased and renamed.
This is huge. I cannot replace these files. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Hello HB3, and a warm welcome to the forums!
8) Attempted to restart with literature saying that you can restart Disk Utility as though it would delete temp files and start again. System could not be found (folder/face/folder/face showed on the screen)
You really shouldn't use a lower OSes DU to work on a higher one.
2) Used Disk Warrior to rebuild directory on disk, but I believe that there is NO space at all. Disk Warrior took a very long time...more than an hour.
What version of DW?
Anyone know of a utility that can help?
If DiskWarrior can't fix it, you might try Data Rescue II...
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/
http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php
(Has a Free Demo to see if it could or not, but you'll need another drive to recover to).
Or FileSalvage...
http://www.subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?%20mainpage=product_info&productsid=1
to recover what you can, both can work when Disks are unmountable.

Need help restoring disk image

I recently backed up my HDD to an image and stored it on an external USB hard drive. I just put a new hard drive in my macbook and so far am unable to restore from the image. I used a bootable mountain lion USB, opened the disk utility, partitioned the drive, and tried to restore using the image as the source and the partition as the destination. It scans the image for a while and eventually gives a "unable to scan, internal error". I can't seem to get past this. I have tried mounting the .dmg before restoring as well.
I went ahead and installed a new copy of os x and that works fine. I tried creating a second partition after booting into os x and restoring the image that way and no luck. I also tried SuperDuper but after it says it copied the contents of the image to the other partition, I browse to that drive and it seems to be blank. I am not sure what to do here. Any help?

Well that is the problem. Not sure why you can open the BC partition but Mac can't make a image of a Windows system, llet alone restore it. OS X can't write NTFS. If it could no one would ever need a program like Win Clone to clone the BC partition on their Mac
GCM707 wrote:
The image has 2 partitions in it, one of them (a bootcamp partition) i can open. the other (my mac os partition) i can't open.

Need Help With Disk Space Issue

I am trying to free up some disk space on my MacBook Pro. Here is what I have in terms of usage of personal files:
Music: 24.7 gb
Pictures: 9.92 gb
Documents: .379 gb
Applications: 9.25 gb
This totals 44.249 gb
My capacity is listed as 111.47 gb. The problem is that I am showing only 11.96 gb available. I don't understand why there is so much gab between what is listed above and the capacity. I realize the System files, Application Support, etc. use a fair amount, but it still seems like I should have more space. I have run Onyx to clear caches, optimize, etc., and that has helped, but only marginally. Are there large files somewhere I am not aware of? I have an iDisk, but I have iDisk Synching off, so there should not be a copy of it on my computer, unless tere is an old oe lurking somewhere. Thanks a lot for any suggestions.

I'll give a very plain answer :P
My Movies folder has a 10 gb size, my Library folder has 5.83 gb, my root Library has 10.89 gb, my System folder has 4.2 gb. I believe there is much more than the basic folders that eats your HDD away.
I don't know if my folders size are normal, but I do know that adding only your basic folders won't give you the real amount of disk used. In my case I have 20.92 gb of space. I would also look the size of the Downloads folder and the Mail folder (in your home/Library/Mail I have 3.5 GB in one account only!)
Hope this helps!
One last thing, not so long ago I saw a post about someone who found a file that was huge, the file was because he let the computer working overnight testing if it ran correctly by letting chess computer vs computer play all night. The game created an enormous file (I believe it was the nbook.db file in username/Library/Application Support/Chess/)
OR... use what Matt Clifton recommends jajaja... seems like a better idea :P
Message was edited by: Ehych

STILL NEED HELP w/ Disk Warrior pleeeaaase

Have had some interesting encounters with extensions: at startup, the system was hanging up at certain extensions, resulting in my manually uninstalling Tech Tool 3 and a new trial graphics program we tried out, called Silhouette. Have also cleaned the disk drive.
However, I am still unable to use the disk drive reliably. After turning off the TWAIN extension (which cleared up the remaining startup problems), the disk drive won't open upon request after I have inserted the Disk Warrior, which I have used successfully in the past. The last time the drawer would open when I clicked on the Eject Upper Drive icon on my computer was when I inserted the Disk Warrior. When I rebooted, twice the computer failed to recognize that there was a disk in there at all, booting all the way up to the OS 9.2 desktop without even an icon showing the presence of the disk. When I hold down the "C" key while rebooting, the screen remains a blank blue color, with no sign of startup. When I let go of the "C" key, the computer boots up fine, but the Eject Upper Drive shortcut doesn't cause the drive door to open. I killed the shortcut and created another alias for the desktop, but it doesn't work either. When I try to reboot and hold down the right button on the mouse, to cause the door to open while rebooting, an icon of a disk appears, with a question mark on its face. If I release the mouse button, the computer starts up fine...but the Upper Drive won't open and I can't see any icon to indicate that I have Disk Warrior in there.
I have been at this all day...does this make sense to anyone?

Hi, Sandy -
The term 'optical drive' is a generic one - it refers to any drive which uses a laser (optical means) to read a disk. This includes a basic CD drive, a CD/DVD drive, etc.
The term 'optical drive' will not appear in System Profiler. Instead, it should appear on one of the "Internal ATA" buses as something like DVD-ROM or one of the other variants of that term. Since your G4 (MDD) has two optical drives, both should be displayed separately, but on the same Internal ATA bus.
If the drive in question is not listed, then there may well be something wrong with the drive itself, as Tom has suggested.
However, if neither of the two optical drives is listed, that would tend to indicate there is something wrong with the bus that serves both those drives - perhaps the cable has become disconnected at the main logic board, or the controller on that board may have failed.
Is there a way to force it open?
On older machines the answer would be yes - the outer drive door could be pried open, and the 'emergency Mac ejection tool' (a straightened paperclip) could be inserted into a hole on the inner face of the drive to manually eject a disk.
Not sure if the newer drives still have that hole, or if it has been relocated to the rear of the drives.
Okay - found an Apple KBase article that addresses that, complete with pictures -
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=88215
It appears that in some cases it is necessary to remove the drive in order to access that hole.

Need help it disk utility!!

when i try to erase the HD macintosh, it doesn't give me the option to erase. The erase button is transparent and I can't click on it. what do I do?

well, that's not what you asked...
by the way, if you have an installation dvd you could be able to restart your mac WITH it (i mean that the dvd must be the startUp disk).
You can do that in many way, as via system preferences -> startup disk , then choose the dvd inserted
then restart your mac and now search for the utility "disk utility" in the dvd (usually it is available in the main menu of a dvd-system)
with that now you should be able to erase your HD with lion installed (loosing all the data in your HD, of course...)
and then you can install a new (or older, but it depends on the hardware of your Mac, read the system requirements of the system you want to install, it could be incompatible) system in your HD
luca

Need Help Recovering Hard Drive Space on Disk Utility

I recently wanted to resize my Boot Camp hard drive partition as I did not need it to be 194 gb. In the process I screwed something up and now that space that was once my Boot Camp Partition is now "free space." My Mac Partition still says that I have 305 gb left and I am unsure how to expand this partition to get back that "grey" space. I've tried using Boot Camp Assistant, starting with Command+R after the "chime," and restoring my OSX (not completely however).
I need help in getting back this missing space. It seems that I have looked everywhere and although people seem to have a similar issue I can't figure it out.
Would restoring Mountain Lion completely by using a USB jump drive solve this problem? I have an external hard drive that uses Time Machine to back up my MacBook so a complete restore shouldn't be an issue.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!
P.S. This is what my disk utility currently looks like...

You can try to use Boot Camp Assistant to completely remove the Windows partition but it might not work.
Simple fact is once you setup a Windows partition you can't fool with it at all, that is unless you use some add on program specifically designed to do that on a Mac computer. If you need to resize the Windows partition you first need to use BCA and remove the partition completely and then recreate it at the new size you want and reinstall Windows.
You might have to use Time Machine and backup your Mac partition then repartition the complete drive and then restore from that Time Machine backup. Then setup the Windows partition and reinstall Windows.

I need help on my MacBook Pro. Recently I've deleted another partition of my disk from the disk utility and I found out that my disk capacity wasn't get into the normal one which is 750GB. Meanwhile I installed window 7 into the partition disk.

I need help on restoring my disk capacity back to normal. I installed window 7 into the partition disk through bootcamp and I deleted it from disk utility. After I erase the partition disk,I get my capacity to 499GB but not 750GB. Do I need to reinstall my MacBook or something to do with the restoring?

Welcome to the Apple Support Communities
Rodney Lai wrote:
I installed window 7 into the partition disk through bootcamp and I deleted it from disk utility
You shouldn't do it. You have to erase the Windows volume with Boot Camp Assistant, so it will restore the space onto the OS X volume and that volume will have 750 GB.
As you did it with Disk Utility, you have to resize your OS X partition manually:
1. Open Disk Utility, select your hard disk at the top of the sidebar, and go to Partition tab.
2. You will see a bar with Macintosh HD. You have to click it at the bottom right corner and drag it to the end of the bar, so Macintosh HD will use all the space of the hard drive, and press Apply.
3. Close Disk Utility and your OS X partition will have 750 GB

I have updated my iphone this evening and is has asked me to connect my phone to itunes, I connected it to a computer with itunes and it says it needs restoring? and all my images etcwill be earsed I need help as I have not backed my iphone up previously

I have updated my iphone this evening and is has asked me to connect my phone to itunes, I connected it to a computer with itunes and it says it needs restoring? and all my images etcwill be earsed I need help as I have not backed my iphone up previously please help?

YOur phone is in recovery mode, any data that was on there is already gone, you will have to restore your phone and use whatever backup you to restore to.

I have a PC and a need help to configure my external hard disk on my network. Thanks

I have a PC and a need help to configure my external hard disk on my network. Thanks

If you mean you wish to plug a USB drive into the Airport Extreme router (or TC not express) that is easy..
The disk must be formatted FAT32.. as if.. stay away from FAT .. or HFS+ ie Mac OS extended Journaled.
Format the disk on a Mac is best.. and even use GUID partition scheme not MBR.
The PC has no issue writing and reading files because this is a network drive.. The PC does not write to the drive.. it writes files to the Airport OS which writes and reads the disk and passes the info using standard windows SMB.. To the windows computer it will be a Windows NT server.. FAT32 setup.
If your setup is different.. to my hugely guessed assumptions.. give details.. always helps to have.. make and model.
Make and model of disk.. make and model of router.. how the setup will be done.. what windows OS you run.. etc etc.
As it stands your question could have nothing to do with apple at all.. other than you posted in a forum so I guess there is something apple in there somewhere.

I need help in reinstalling photoshop.I do not have the original disk. How can i reinstall PS?

I need help in reinstalling photoshop.I do not have the original disk. How can i reinstall PS?

Which full scale version of PS do you need?
Nancy O.

Need help w/installation from disks

recently purchased CS6 Creative Suite Design/Web b/c 5.5 was bombing too much and locking up. Now we can not get past the "sign in' registration for trial version of all the software we purchased? we do not want the trial versions we want the actual programs that we are upgrading to...Please help us I can not do my work until this is resolved.

Need assistance.
We need to purchase the Creative Suite 6 software WITH install disks. Our systems are within a secure environment without Internet access for download or activation. We can call out on a phone for the code, but we need the install disks to take in and load.
Please advise as to the specific Item number to order that will provide the Install Disks OR what source I need to contact to get the needed disks.
Thank you.
David
703-399-1613

Disk utility can't repair disk, back up and restore files......I need help, I'm worried I'll lose all my photos, files etc

Mac started hanging up while streamlining a kids show. Restarted and got the screen with the apple and the circle. restarted with control-option p and r. Ran disk repairitem got the following results;
invalid index key,
it rebuilds catalog b-tree,
volume repair complete,
updating boot support partitions for the volume as required,
Error disk utility can't repair disk
I'm then prompted to back up all files, reformat the disk and restore backed up files.
Obviously need help here as I think I'm in danger of losing my files, photos etc if I don't do this right.
Can anyone help
Steve

You might want to back up the disk as soon as possible, do the repair, then back it up again. First time will have the issues that Disk Utility can't fix, however, you'll have the data saved. Then, once you get things repaired, make a new backup, and go from there.
If you're going to use a hard drive directly connected to your iMac for backup, this is what I mentioned earlier: http://twelvesouth.com/products/backpack/ Great way to use space behind the iMac without adding something else to the desk top. You can buy it through Apple online/stores or Amazon, and there are probably other sources too.
For external hard drives, I like those sold by OWC at http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/ as many of them use Oxford chip sets, wihch work well with macs (I've used several for years with no issues). Most pre-packaged drive/cases have a 3 year warranty, although you can buy a case and add your own hard drive. I like Western Digital Scorpio Blacks that have a 5 year warranty.

Need help to reformat the disk drive

Hi Guys,
I have a Powerbook G4 and I am trying to reformat my hard drive to be case insensitive instead of sensitive. The only problem is I don't have my installation disks. Is there any way i can reformat it without the disks? And if I do need a c.d. rom where can I get one?
Need help!!!
Thanks

Just to be sure . . .
You are aware that reformatting will erase the drive, right?
So if you want to keep any data, you'll have to figure out how?

HT1338 Attempt to install Mountain Lion has highlighted need for internal disk repair. Even after "repair" ML still says disk is damaged. Attempt to restore from Time Machine back-up failed - cannot 'see' internal HD to restore to. Help!

Attempt to install Mountain Lion has highlighted need for internal disk repair. Even after "repair" ML still says disk is damaged. Attempt to restore from Time Machine back-up failed - cannot 'see' internal HD to restore to. Help! Has attempt to install ML caused these problems or just highlighted existing need to Repair Disk? Even so, why can back-up from Time Machine not see the internal drive to restore to?

Csound1, William & Sig .... thanks for taking the trouble to reply. I fear you are right - I'll need a new disk. I'm booked in at the Apple Genius Bar in Bordeaux, France on Wed ... quite a challenge as my French isn't great! The current internal disk is 500gb, does anyone know whether I can upgrade my 21.5" iMac (circa Oct-2009 vintage) to a larger size internal disk, 1Tb or even 2Tb? I already have one external 2Tb drive and another one on order (I have masses of media stored and more planned as I've just taken up photography). Seems a bit of a pain managing with only 500gb internal storage. OR, can you advise me on how I can store all my photos on my new 2Tb external drive - I can't seem to figure out how to set the path for iPhoto to see them (I can't even figure out where they are stored right now!). Same with iTunes, how do I set the default storage to the external drive (I moved everything manually and then imported them all from the new drive - it worked but seemed very convoluted). Any advice on how to manage multiple drives gratefully received. And thanks again for previous replies.

Needs help earsing disk!

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