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Time Machine cannot find a backup able target disk

H

hajime

macrumors G3
Original poster
Jul 23, 2007
8,173
1,414
Hello, I bought a LaCie P9223 external drive to backup my MBP 2010. Using disk utilities under Mac OS X El Capitan, I reformatted it to Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) with the GUID Partition Table selected. When I tried to use Time Machine to back up my Mac, I got an error message saying that Time Machine cannot find a backup able target disk. I reformatted the drive using the same options again but it does not help.

To test if the drive has been mounted successfully, I dragged a file to the drive icon to copy it. I got a message saying that to change LaCie P9223, the administrator name and password are required. I clicked confirm and the copying was successful. I tried to copy another file to this drive. Again, I got the same message.

Anybody knows how to fix the issues? Thanks
 
Thanks. According to Get Info, "system" and "wheel" has read and write access while "everyone" has read access only. What is "wheel"? There is no such user on my Mac.

Even I have changed the access right of "everyone" to read and write, Time Machine still says that backup failed because it cannot find a target. What shall I do?
 
You should not manually change disk permissions. ‘system’ is how Finder calls root, ‘wheel’ is one of the user groups of which only root is a member. It means that the volume currently belongs to root, not to you. For a correctly configured Time Machine that is normal, but not for a new HFS+ volume. It should be owned by you and ‘ownership’ should be ignored (the checkbox at the bottom of the Get Info window).

I am not clear on how far you set up Time Machine. Were you able to select it in System Preferences and only the first backup fails? Where does the error message appear?
 
The error appears when I tried to use the new external drive as Time Machine backup. Yes, the first backup always fails.
 
Can you try again and look if anything is recorded in the Console application (in the Utilities directory)? There should be entries there under ‘com.apple.backupd’. Post them here if there is anything.
 
Sounds like the LaCie did not get formatted properly. I would reformat it and then see if you can transfer files to it before trying Time Machine.
 
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