Drive Genius (harddrive contains errors)

[532499]

hello all. wonderful place you have here.

i first want to apologize in advance if this question has been asked, or solved already. i've just registered and the search didn't encompass all the information i was looking for as per the first page (laziness, perhaps?)

i've recently installed Drive genius 3 onto my mac mini.
(mini 2,1): i will post specs in my sig shortly (strapped for time)

the problem:
DrivePulse, a monitoring & notification program tells me of a *critical* event, "The hda1 volume contains errors. The volume should be repaired as soon as possible."

being that my computer is operating no worse, and no better than it ever has, i'm not too worried, but would like to investigate said problem... because, who doesn't like a good nerdy problem, right?

problem is, when i try to boot from my DG3 startup disc, the screen will never display: i believe this is because my monitor is a 22" vizio HDTV. the native resolution is 1920 x 1080, which may not be supported by the drivers loaded by the DG3 startup disc.

is there anyway of accomplishing this short of borrowing, or buying another monitor?

help and links will be very much appreciated! thank you all kindly!

 

[Stan Mikulenka]

Hi dethkannon,
the easiest way to use Drive Genius (or any other utility like iDefrag, TechTool Pro) is to install macOS on external HD (partition) with all this utilities installed there & start from that HD. Then you can fix your internal HD instead starting from all this individual repair disks.
Some of them take forever to start from.
When it took 8 Minutes to start from my TechTool Pro disk I knew that was last time I'll do it that way.
You'd by-pass all these probs...

 

[532499]

Hi dethkannon,
the easiest way to use Drive Genius (or any other utility like iDefrag, TechTool Pro) is to install macOS on external HD (partition) with all this utilities installed there & start from that HD. Then you can fix your internal HD instead starting from all this individual repair disks.
Some of them take forever to start from.
When it took 8 Minutes to start from my TechTool Pro disk I knew that was last time I'll do it that way.
You'd by-pass all these probs...

never thought of this! i have about 300GB of data on my external, what tool should i use to create a partition (preferably without losing data)?

 

[Damo01]

If are you using Leopard or snow Leopard, you can use Disk Utility (the live partitioning tool to resize the current partition to smaller size without destroying the data and create another partition on the same drive)

But I suggest you make a backup of the data, that mostly important to you that do not want to lose.

 

[Fishrrman]

"never thought of this! i have about 300GB of data on my external, what tool should i use to create a partition (preferably without losing data)?"

Since you already have Drive Genius already on your internal hard drive, I'd suggest you do this:

1. Open DG and go to the "Defrag" panel
3. Select your EXTERNAL drive and defrag it. This will "concentrate" all the files into a contiguous block at the "leading end" of the drive's sectors. It leaves a single continguous block of free space at the trailing end.
4. Now, go to DG's "Repartition" panel.
5. Again, select your EXTERNAL drive. You should now be able to use DG to create a second partition on that drive. It doesn't have to be overly "large" -- 25-20gb should be fine.

What to do with the newly-created "empty" partition:

I'd suggest you get out your original install DVD's, and do a "clean install" of the OS onto the empty partition. Use the installer's "customize" options to "trim away the fat", and only install the basics.

When that's complete, reboot from the newly-installed system.

If you don't already know how to "switch boot", do this:
a. Reboot
b. Hold down the Option key and KEEP HOLDING IT DOWN
c. You will see that Startup Manager panel displayed, it should show both your internal drive and the newly-created system
d. Use the arrow key, or the tab key, or the mouse pointer to select the new partition system and press the enter (or return) key.

You should now boot from the new partition and it should "come up" as if you were on a brand-new Mac. That is, you have to create a new account. Make it an administrator account and I strongly suggest that you use THE SAME username and password as you use on your internal account.

Once you have the new account created, go to Software Update and "bring it up to current".

You will also need to copy (or install) Drive Genius onto the new partition.

The idea is to create a bootable "emergency" startup partition that you can reach for if for any reason you're having problems with the internal drive.

Once you get Drive Genius installed on the new partition, launch it and do diagnostics and/or repairs to the internal drive.

You will find it very very handy to have that second, bootable startup partition around.

You can also launch Disk Utility and "aim it" at the internal. DU can't do repairs on the boot drive -- it has to be "booted externally" to do such things.

One other thing. The "errors" you mentioned in your first post may be only directory errors that can be repaired "through software". They don't necessarily point to a hardware failure of the drive itself. Also, when you do software repairs to a drive, don't stop after the "first run". Run the diagnostics again, and see if all the errors are gone. Repeat as necessary.

 

[Stan Mikulenka]

Hi again dethkannon,
the easiest would be to use CCC ("Carbon Copy Cloner") which is free or "SuperDuper!" which is commercial product. (I have both.)
You can chose to create bootable copy of your HD (it might take an Hour or so).
You can use USB or FireWire enclosure for your external enclosure.
This will copy your entire HD & you can use it anytime you have any probs with your internal HD. You can use Disk Utilities to create a partition on external HD (you need only size a little bigger than your internal HD).

 

[532499]

thank you for all your kind and timely responses! i have printed this out for reference while going through this... unfortunately i'm hung up with defragging my external. "operation cannot be performed on this drive" the drive is on, and functioning. i cannot find much on this but it may be because the drive is connected via USB and not firewire? formatted as FAT32, 1TB... maybe i should look into borrowing or getting a windows computer to perform the defrag?

unfortunately i both go to school and work, add in a lady and i don't have much in the way of free time (heh heh)

i hope to get this going and completed over the weekend!

 

[Fishrrman]

"i cannot find much on this but it may be because the drive is connected via USB and not firewire? formatted as FAT32, 1TB..."

I'll _guess_ (ONLY a "guess) that the drive is FAT32 and is _not_ formatted for the Mac OS, is this correct?

Not good, really.

If you're using a drive with the Mac, it should be formatted for the _Mac OS_. This can prevent all kinds of headaches down the line.

More suggestions:
1. I don't know whether the data that is currently on that drive "lives anywhere else" -- is it copied from your internal, or backed up anywhere?
2. I would suggest you consider RE-INITIALIZING the external drive, and this time initialize it for the Mac OS. You might also consider partitioning it as I mentioned above.
3. Then, re-copy your files over.
NOTE: as another poster mentioned, CarbonCopyCloner would be an ideal way to do this.

Get the external into Mac format first, then work on the other problems.

 

[Stan Mikulenka]

Hi again,
as Fishrr said, you can't de-fragment a win partition with a mac defrag utility, you will have to do that from the winOS (if you have a BootCamp win or Parallels will do, too).
In windows, go to Start/Accessories/Manage Computer (I think) - there is built-in defrag appl. This is on winXP.
If you don't have a PC on your Mac you'd have to plug this external in a PC.
I'll show you how many hard drives I have plugged in my Mini. Most are PC OS based (I have 6 Macs + 4 PCs). As you can see my 'My Book' (back-up + torrent downloading) is NTFS (windows) & is 24hrs being used on my Mac:
(And all these HDs are hooked-up thru USB)

 

[532499]

just to check in with an update, i have my external currently defragging via a borrowed windows laptop.

i ran drive genius' verify operation and, to my surprise, my mac drive (internal) is corrupted! (?) forgive my skepticism, for it may be because i'm a lifelong windows user (switched one year ago) but isn't it next to impossible for a computer to operate with a corrupted harddrive? (being that the operating system is installed on the corrupted disk!)

wish me luck! and again, thank you to everyone who has advised me. your help is very much appreciated!

cheers!

 

[532499]

i was able to create a HFS+ partition on the disk, in order to move my files from the FAT32 part over. unfortuntately neither drive genius nor disk utility wants to resize the FAT32 partition.

i then formatted the old FAT32 partition to HFS+, in hopes that with two HFS+ partitions the disk utility and DG3 wouldn't have any qualms, to no avail i now have two partitions, both HFS+ and both about 460GB each. i'd like to have, ideally, 3 partitions. one being about 20GB for a OS X install, one about 240 GB (to back up my 120 GB harddrive), and the rest for storage.

with the right software, i should be fine-in-no-time.

now to find it!

 

[532499]

excuse the double post.

just plugged the external into my mac, having tried on my PC, and noticed that the sizes of the partitions are off/different.

my mac displays the capacities at 507gb, and the other at 492gb.

 

[532499]

update:

so i was in a bit of a jam, but now couldn't be more satisfied. thank you, iPartition!

resized, formatted, grew, shrunk, created... anything you want. WITHOUT data loss. this program could have saved me a day of playing around with Disk Utility and Drive 'Genius'.

i now have (about) a 250GB part for time machine, a 25GB part for a remote OS, and a 715GB partition for storage. time machine is backing up now, then i will reboot & install os x 10.5, and FINALLY get to my problematic internal hard drive!

but, after all this, one must ask the question; do you think my drive is actually corrupted? after DG3 was shown up so much by iPartition, i question it's intuition!

 

[532499]

i was able to partition my harddrive as i wanted, but wasn't able to install os x onto my 25gb partition because the drive didn't have a GUID partition scheme (rolls eyes): https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1085356/

if there's a way to do this without losing my data, please let me know. i'm subscribed to both threads, so either will work!

thanks again!
cheers.