Disk Utility Unexpectedly Quits!

[Aniej]

I am a bit worried and stumped at the same time. I run Onyx at times to clean caches and run some scripts; included with this utility is a feature that alerts if there is a S.M.A.R.T. hard disk problem about to occur. A message started coming up today saying: "error occurred when checking the SMART status of your hard disk... Onyx has detected a problem, back up your hard drive." To add to this wonderful message, disk utility crashes every time I try to repair permissions and I have already gone into terminal and run through fsck. Does anyone have a clue what is going on here and how to resolve this; I really need some help here. I have a powerbook G4 if that matter and yes, I have backed up my entire hard drive. I can post the crash report if that helps.

 

[iMeowbot]

First, on the SMART status thing, what does Disk Utility show for the status? I would trust what it has to say more than I would onyx. (in disk Utility, it will show up in the bottom of the window when you click on the device's icon)

On the repair permissions problem, you can try running it from terminal with

sudo diskutil repairPermissions /

to see what it has to say.

or to check without attempting to repair,

diskutil verifyPermissions /

(fsck is behind the other part, Verify Disk.)

 

[Aniej]

Good advice. I went to disk utility and it says SMART status: verified. A good sign. I am guessing the disk utility problem is not correlated with the weird Onyx message I was getting regarding the SMART warning? I am going to follow step two now and see what happens.

Thanks again for the help, I really appreciate it.

 

[Aniej]

crap, I am back where I began.

Actually every time I try to repair permissions through terminal it tells me illegal action or asks for my password and then tells me illegal action. I am lost again

 

[iMeowbot]

Actually every time I try to repair permissions through terminal it tells me illegal action or asks for my password and then tells me illegal action. I am lost again

The password prompt is normal, sudo will prompt for it from time to time.

Can you copy and paste the diskutil output here? That error message seems odd.

----

The reason why I doubted what Onyx had to say is that it reported an error while trying to check, not a bad SMART value. It may have simply misparsed the output of the diskutil command, but it's hard to say since it didn't bother to mention what the error was.

(The way to get to that info in Terminal is diskutil info / for the boot volume, diskutil info /Volumes/whatever for additional drives

 

[Aniej]

The password prompt is normal, sudo will prompt for it from time to time.

Can you copy and paste the diskutil output here? That error message seems odd.

I can copy and paste just fine, but I keep getting the illegal message. This is very odd. Ready for something I find even more peculiar? I keep getting a message telling me I have mail when I open up terminal. Here is a copy of the message (I replaced my login with "username"). If I ever get past this illegal instruction, I get password prompt and then it says illegal instruction after I enter the password.

Welcome to Darwin!
You have mail.
mycomputer:~ username$ sudo diskutil repairPermissions /
Illegal instruction
mycomputer:~ username$

 

[iMeowbot]

Oh all right, illegal instruction! Now that's language I understand

Since you are getting this consistently from the same program, it suggests that either diskutil, sudo, or one of the libraries related to them has somehow become corrupted. This would help explain why Onyx got upset, it may have seen the same error message.

For the immediate problem - checking out that permissions are okay - you can boot from an OS X install disc and run Disk Utility from there. That will use its own copy of the programs and avoid whatever is wrong with your on-disk copy of diskutil (or perhaps sudo).

With that out of the way, back in regular OS X, you can try running the diskutil verifyPermissions / command (without sudo) to see if diskutil is what's broken, and sudo ls or something equally innocuous to see if sudo is what's broken.

Pacifist would be one way to grab clean copies of those bits of the system. If that brings no joy, an archive and install of OS X may be in order, if you want the permissions check back.

====

On the mail thing, that's normal, it's the vestigial Unix mail facility, and the mail probably came from a scheduled job from cron or the like. You can ignore it, or use the mail command in Terminal to read what's there (but those mails are rarely interesting). You can type d at the mail prompt to delete them.

 

[Aniej]

Thanks a ton for the suggestgions, they are really well thought out and I hope they will work. A new addition to this problem is that I cannot install items such as the iTunes update for example. These two areas seem like they are related, but I really do not know. Thoughts?

 

[iMeowbot]

Yes, they could be related. Is it the case that anything that asks for an admin password croaks?

You might try using the Console utility to look for interesting error messages. I've nothing specific in mind, but perhaps a pattern will turn up somewhere. It may be more useful to concentrate first on the problems in those Terminal commands, just because they are much less complicated than the GUI installer mess.

 

[Aniej]

I have not run Console utility, I fact I have never even heard of it. I will look around and give it a shot.

The admin question is a great deduction. it is hard to tell if anything with admin password fails though because the only things with admin passwords that I use are installer and, well, logging in. I will poke around and see if i can find some, unless you have a suggestions, which I am sure you will judging on how much you have already been able to answer so far.

_ _
Don't forget to vote Tuesday, November 7th. If you are pleased with the way our country, states, and cities are being run or really pissed off, take action. Vote!

 

[iMeowbot]

I guess you could try dragging any old file into the /System/Library folder to see what happens. Or, opening the lock icon in the Accounts system preferences should trigger a prompt.

Even if these do fail, that may not exactly tell you very much, again unless some droppings are left in the logs. OS X uses a complicated Rube Goldberg mechanism to keep tabs on admin access, there are a few places where it could break :/

 

[Aniej]

I tried running what you suggested in terminal to isolate the problem, but this is what I got:

Last login: Wed Nov 1 21:09:29 on console
Welcome to Darwin!
You have mail.
mycomputer:~ username$ diskutil verifyPermissions /
Illegal instruction
mycomputer:~ username$

This is what I was getting before. Am I entering it wrong?