Disk Utility and DiskWarrior trouble with external hard-drive.

[Jesse Smith]

I got an external hard-drive that doesn't show up on finder. On both Disk Utility and DiskWarrior it keeps mounting and un-mounting. Disk Utility when trying to repair, spits this out when it un-mounts...

2011-07-28 22:43:43 -0700: Problems were encountered during repair of the partition map
2011-07-28 22:43:43 -0700: Error: Some information was unavailable during an internal lookup.
2011-07-28 22:43:43 -0700: : Some information was unavailable during an internal lookup.
2011-07-28 22:43:43 -0700: [DUDiskController mountDisk] expecting DUDisk, but got nil

On DiskWarrior it simply says 'Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failure (-36,2747)

Earlier today it would stay mounted and Disk Utility would spit out...

Verify and Repair volume “Back-up Hard Drive”
Checking file systemChecking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
Rebuilding catalog B-tree.
Invalid node structure
The volume Back-up Hard Drive could not be repaired.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

while DiskWarrior would try to fix it, but on

Step 5: Locating directory date...

Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 339,474, er make that 340,239, er make that 341,327

and I finally gave up there.

I try to fix the Invalid sibling link error via Terminal and I get this...

imac-2:~ Migrated$ fsck_hfs -r /dev/disk2s2
** /dev/rdisk2s2 (NO WRITE)
Can't open /dev/rdisk2s2: Resource busy


Is there ANY THING I can do to get it to stay mounted and possibly fix this? This is my back-up hard-drive!!

 

[vidicious]

Solution?

Did you find a solution to this? I'm in the same boat ... same error code.

 

[Detrius]

Do you know the drive is good? Run a surface scan. Neither of those tools will test the hardware.

 

[gr8tfly]

Sounds like the drive is toast.

However I have had experiences where the power supply and/or enclosure was bad and the drive itself was OK. If it's the kind of enclosure that you can remove the drive and connect it with either another enclosure or a bare drive test cable (SATA <> USB for instance), you could at least eliminate the enclosure as the source of the trouble.

If you can get the Finder to mount it as read-only (as it sometimes will with a bad drive), take it as your one chance to copy the data to a new drive. I had something similar happen to a Time Machine drive. I was able to get the drive to mount read-only and was able to copy the backup to another drive. I was able to browse it using Time Machine, but I decided to shelve the new drive as an archive and start a fresh TM on a yet another drive. I just didn't have 100% trust in the recovered backup to continue using it. If I need something back in that time frame, there's a good chance I'll be able to find it, though.

 

[DewGuy1999]

I've heard of people with failing hard drives that have put them in the freezer while connect to their Mac and this allowed one last access of the data. Since the drive appears to be toast you probably don't have anything to loose if you try it.