Disk Repair error - help

[icharry]

Still running 10.6.8 on iMac 2010? i7 quad core 2.9. 8GB ram

So I was trying to run StreamClip and it would not let me. Also could not duplicate files. Ran disk repair. It said to run it from a different startup drive (10.9.2 firewire)... did that and got this... see attached.

What to do?

 

[DeltaMac]

The Mavericks Disk Utility SHOULD work - try rebooting to that same external, after setting that HD as the startup disk, and starting up from a full shut down.
Then, try Disk Utility.
If that still won't work for you -
I suggest that you repair while booted to the same generation of OS X as the drive that you are repairing.
Boot to your Snow Leopard installer DVD - or another drive that boots with Snow Leopard.

(Is that the same Mac with a failing hard drive that you asked about a month ago? Did you replace that drive yet? If not - there's no better time to do that! Do you have a good backup?)

 

[hologram]

I would suggest running DiskWarrior. If anything can repair the file system, it would most likely be that.

It's not cheap, at US$99, but it's one of those things that you practically have to have in your toolbox, and it works with 10.3.x and above.

 

[DeltaMac]

I absolutely agree with the suggestion about Disk Warrior. It's a must-have for any Mac maintenance tools.
You may find that a good boot to another boot disk, then Disk Utility may fix without the need for Disk Warrior (which remains the next step, if DU does not help)

 

[icharry]

Yes it is the same drive that was making the noise - which it has not done since about a day after I posted that - good memory. I have a pretty solid backup...

Will back up again then try full shutdown - I just did a restart to the external with the 10.9 to run disk utility... then maybe blow off disk warrior and put that $99 towards a new drive.

thanks

 

[ZVH]

"Live file system repair" means that you're trying to repair the file system that you've booted off of. You need to either boot from another bootable drive and do the file system repair on "Mac HD" or you need to do it from the recovery volume.

That type of problem is often trivial and easily fixed unless the drive itself is going. If the drive is starting to fail this may happen more and more frequently and it would indicate that you're losing sectors progressively. I use Scannerz to check the media of drives to evaluate that because a full scan on the drive will pick up things SMART testing won't because SMART only reports on failures after the fact. Disk Warrior is probably the best recovery tool IMHO but it's also pretty expensive, so I'd try out Disk Utility first.

Applicable Links:

Drive Testing: http://scsc-online.com/Scannerz.html
Drive Recovery: http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/

 

[Weaselboy]

Yes it is the same drive that was making the noise - which it has not done since about a day after I posted that - good memory. I have a pretty solid backup...

Will back up again then try full shutdown - I just did a restart to the external with the 10.9 to run disk utility... then maybe blow off disk warrior and put that $99 towards a new drive.

thanks

From your description of the noise in the other thread, and now this... that drive is a goner. One suggestion though. You mentioned updating your backup. If you mean update your backup from this near dead drive, that might be a bad idea. Depending on what backup software you are using, you may be overwriting good data with corrupted data from the drive.

 

[TheBSDGuy]

WeaselBoy is right. That drive is near death. You could take a tool like Scannerz or any other tool and the odds are that during one test it might have 30 errors, and on the next test, it could have 50. You're experiencing mechanical drive failure that's getting progressively worse.

All hard drives use an indexing system. When you want to gain access to a file for reading or writing, the OS first interrogates the indexing system on the drive to find out where the files are located on the drive and then moves the drive heads to the appropriate locations to work on the files. If the indexing system wasn't in place, you would end up having to scan an entire drive from the start of the drive until you found the file, which would take an extremely long time, especially on large drives.

When a file suddenly gets corrupted because of bad sectors, the index gets corrupted. Files that existed in the index no longer exist. It's sort of like books in a library, and the indexing system used by that library. If you want to look up a book, you use the library system's index, and then go to find the book. If the book isn't there, you might assume it's being used by someone else (the equivalent of a file being modified), so you go to the librarian (the OS kernel) and see if the book is in use (the file is being modified.) The librarian has what amounts to a currently active index and if the book is in use (the file is being modified) then the librarian can tell you when it's available because she'll know when it's returned (the updates are complete.) If, however, the librarian sees that the file hasn't been checked out by another user (the file is being modified) and the book clearly isn't where it's supposed to be, the librarian has to attempt to find the file (did the system crash while a file was being written and it's contents are scattered all over the drive) and if it isn't found, assume the book was stolen (bad sectors destroyed the file and it's no longer available).

I hope my little analogy makes sense, but the implication is that Disk Utility is constantly needing to "repair" your drive because it's losing data. When you run a repair operation with Disk Utility, you're not repairing the drive or bad sectors on a drive, you're correcting indexing problems. That's all Disk Utility does.

In my opinion, the people that wrote Scannerz have the right approach to handling bad drives because they tell you to reformat and zero the drive in their manuals. If the drive is failing, it will fail to properly zero out and it will become obvious that the drive needs replacement. Other tools that offer "repair" options aren't repairing anything. They're hoping to re-map a bad sector to the drive's spare sectors, and although this might work on an odd and limited set of sectors that have media defects, it will only delude a user into thinking they've fixed a hard drive that has no hope of being fixed.

Cheerio, Chaps!

 

[ZVH]

Say, that's quite a good write up on indexing, BSD.

 

[macuser453787]

then maybe blow off disk warrior and put that $99 towards a new drive.

You may want to consider getting a new drive and DiskWarrior also. I agree with other posters - it's a must have utility and good to have when needed. It's also great for preventative maintenance. Actually DiskWarrior and Drive Genius are both awesome utilities IMO.

----------

Say, that's quite a good write up on indexing, BSD.

Yes thanks for that!

 

[TheBSDGuy]

Everyone has their own opinions on test tools, but with a 1T HD costing just over 50 bucks, I can't see spending hundreds of dollars on stuff like TechTool Pro, Drive Genius, or Disk Warrior. I don't particularly care for the limited drive scanning capabilities of TTP or DG, and although I think highly of Disk Warrior, I've generally found that reformatting a drive and restoring it from a backup actually takes less time than it takes for DiskWarrior to repair a drive in many cases.

....now if you're the type of person that doesn't bother backing anything up then yes, you should buy tools...in fact you should probably buy every tool on the market because when you have problems.....you'll need them...and it still may not help.

 

[macuser453787]

Everyone has their own opinions on test tools...I don't particularly care for the limited drive scanning capabilities of TTP or DG...

Indeed they do. Actually I've never heard of Scannerz before reading this thread yesterday. Is that your preferred util?

Also just curious: in what way is DG limited in it's scanning capabilities? TTP hasn't mattered much to me since I started using DG v1. Haven't used TTP since the days of OS9, just before I made the switch to OSX.

 

[TheBSDGuy]

@macuser453787:

Sorry for getting back so late, but I don't log in every day. More like every few days.

In any case, I use Scannerz for testing drives media, the cable, and system. The difference between Scannerz and TechTool Pro (TTP) or Drive Genius (DG) is that both TTP and DG have scanning as more or less an add-on feature, whereas Scannerz is dedicated to scanning and related tests.

In numerous cases, I've had bad drives and TTP gave them clean bills of health, failing to recognize problems even the OS was reporting as I/O errors. With DG I've seen it do nothing more than develop a case of hiccups when confronted with bad drives, meaning it would start a test, get to a failure point, reset, restart, and keep repeating until terminated. Scannerz has shown that it can plow right through these, detect every bad sector plus weak sectors, which are every bit as important and produce real test results.

I don't fully understand how or why DG and TTP can't do as good a job. I suspect that since Scannerz is using hardware access it ignores the OS and file system and evaluates raw media, but DG and TTP appear to do almost an fsck-like scan on the file system, which would explain why they have such problems with bad but still detectable drives.

I'm not really trying to put DG or TTP down - they are what they are, and what they are are multi-tools lacking any degree of speciality. They have a lot of other features like defragging drives, file recovery, etc. that may be of value to people, but I can't speak to how well any of them do their jobs since I typically don't use those features.

I guess comparing Scannerz to DG or TPP is sort of like comparing a cardiologist (specialist) to a general practitioner.

 

[macuser453787]

@macuser453787:

Sorry for getting back so late, but I don't log in every day. More like every few days.

In any case, I use Scannerz for testing drives media, the cable, and system. The difference between Scannerz and TechTool Pro (TTP) or Drive Genius (DG) is that both TTP and DG have scanning as more or less an add-on feature, whereas Scannerz is dedicated to scanning and related tests.

In numerous cases, I've had bad drives and TTP gave them clean bills of health, failing to recognize problems even the OS was reporting as I/O errors. With DG I've seen it do nothing more than develop a case of hiccups when confronted with bad drives, meaning it would start a test, get to a failure point, reset, restart, and keep repeating until terminated. Scannerz has shown that it can plow right through these, detect every bad sector plus weak sectors, which are every bit as important and produce real test results.

I don't fully understand how or why DG and TTP can't do as good a job. I suspect that since Scannerz is using hardware access it ignores the OS and file system and evaluates raw media, but DG and TTP appear to do almost an fsck-like scan on the file system, which would explain why they have such problems with bad but still detectable drives.

I'm not really trying to put DG or TTP down - they are what they are, and what they are are multi-tools lacking any degree of speciality. They have a lot of other features like defragging drives, file recovery, etc. that may be of value to people, but I can't speak to how well any of them do their jobs since I typically don't use those features.

I guess comparing Scannerz to DG or TPP is sort of like comparing a cardiologist (specialist) to a general practitioner.

Hey just saw your post! Thanks for the explanation, man. Yes your analogy makes sense. Specialists know more about what they specialize in than those who only have a general understanding of a given area of expertise. (Incidentally, that's one thing I really like about DW.) I appreciate your candor, and I do think DG does a fine job overall (scanning shortcomings notwithstanding). I have used DG many times for defragging, cloning, and on-the-fly re-partitioning.

 

[rambo47]

Before giving up on repairing your hdd you might give it a try through the Terminal app. I've had issues where the Disk Utility app would not work but the Terminal did. And it's very easy to use even if you're not a Unix geek.

Open a Terminal shell (window) by clicking on Terminal.app just like you would for any other program.

Terminal can be found in Applications > Utilities.

Type this, or copy/paste it into your Terminal shell:
diskutil repairPermissions /
Pay attention to the spaces and capitalization. There is a space after "diskutil" and after "repairPermissions".

Terminal should show you the progress as it repairs things.

 

[FreemanW]

Repair!?!?

The drive is laying down for its dirt nap.

If the OP icharry has not retrieved his data from the drive . . . . . yet . . . . that ought to be the singular focus, then transport the drive to the nearest rifle range for target practice.