Repair External SSD

[maxmaut]

I have a 4TB Glyph SSD that I was using as a media storage device for my photos and videos. It was also used as a time machine drive.

It's a RAID drive, and I have 3.6TB used at the moment. It was working great for the past few years, and today when mounting it, I got an error, sayign that MacOS could not verify the disk and that I should create backups ASAP.

I still see all the files on it no problem.

What I was doing recently is sorting the photos, adding macos color tags to them and then removing them. For some reason removing was extremely slow. I think it was a problem with indexing.

Then, I made the drive my time machine drive. I made a few backups on old machine, then restored ffrom one of them and never made a backup. Yesterday I told time machien to use this drive as backup drive, and it asked if I want to merge backups with old ones, so I said yes.

Today when mounting the drive, I get the problem. I don't think there was any physical damage to the drive or anything else, and it would be a real conincidence if the time machine stuff was not related to this issue.

I am not sure how to fix it though. Disk Util cannot repair, when I select physical drive, or when I select Volume.

I tried diskwarrior, it says drive is in use and it cannot rebuild it. I tried booting in recovery mode, and using first aid – same issues.

What else can I do? The pictures and videos have tremendous sentimental value for me, I am ready to buy another 4TB drive jsut to copy them over and try erasing this one, but before I spend money I wanted to ask here.

 

[maxmaut]

Additionally, when running:

➜ ~ diskutil verifyVolume /Volumes/4\ TB\ AtomRAID
I get the output after a while:


The operation might have failed in part because an unmount operation was dissented by PID 2411 (/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mds_stores) whose PPID is 1 (/sbin/launchd)

So it is spotlight?

 

[Bigwaff]

Yes. Search forum. There are many threads with instructions on how to kill Spotlight process and have it ignore drives.

 

[maxmaut]

Yes. Search forum. There are many threads with instructions on how to kill Spotlight process and have it ignore drives.

Sure, the thing is – even if I do add the drive to privacy exsemption and kill the process, the process immediately is re-launched and the verification/repair through terminal still fails.

 

[maxmaut]

Made sure my data is safe, and am trying to erase the drive now, but to no avail. Disk cannot be unmounted if I try to erase the volume. Disk cannot be accessed if I try to erase the disk.WOuld appreciate any suggestions.

 

[Bigwaff]

If data is safe, pull the plug. Reboot to Recovery. Plug in drive. Disk Utility reformat.

 

[maxmaut]

If data is safe, pull the plug. Reboot to Recovery. Plug in drive. Disk Utility reformat.

That's what I was saying, reformat was not working.


But I ahve figured it out and will leave my sol;ution here for future generations:

If the Disk itself could not be erased, or repaired on MacOS, what yo ucan do is unmount all the logic drives, and THEN attempt to repair it or erase it. Worked for me, and the SSD works like a charm now.

I think there is an issue caused by Spotlight and Time Machine.

After restoring the working condition of my drive, I decided to again let time machine to back up to it, and the SAME thing ahppened again, the drive could not get unmounted, repaired or erased.

 

[FFabian]

I suggest checking the SSDs Drive Health / TBW with a tool like DriveDX before you use it as a backup drive again.