Time Machine partition not being recognized.

[bluedoggiant]

So I have the 1TB 7200 RPM Touro drive with two partitions. One partition is being used for Time Machine and suddenly my macbook pro doesn't mount it. It mounts the other partition and it works perfectly, but my Time Machine partition shows up in disk utility as unmounted and will not mount. Any suggestions? It says the drive needs repairing, but when I click repair disk it says it cannot be repaired.

 

[simonsi]

No idea why it won't mount - but that is a very limited backup strategy (assuming the other partition is your boot drive) - about the only protection it gives is against you accidentally deleting a file....any drive failure will almost certainly affect both partitions on the same HDD....

 

[ColdCase]

Sounds like the TM partition is damaged. You need to reformat it and start over.

 

[simon48]

If you're booting off of the other partition while trying to repair the TM partition on the same drive it might not work. Try booting into the recovery partition (cmd + R on boot) and try repairing it there. This very well might not help, but it's worth a try before using more extreme measures.

 

[bluedoggiant]

No idea why it won't mount - but that is a very limited backup strategy (assuming the other partition is your boot drive) - about the only protection it gives is against you accidentally deleting a file....any drive failure will almost certainly affect both partitions on the same HDD....

To update you all. The working partition had just one file in it, I partitioned the hard drive when I got it so that I can use one for TM, and the other for unimportant files that I don't want to take up space on my macbook pro (so they're not actually backed up).

But to re-iterate, yes it is very strange that one partition was working 100% perfectly, yet the TM partition was totally unaccessible. Disk Utility was unable to even erase and reformat the drive! The reason being because even though the non TM partition worked fine....it could not unmount...Disk Utility unmounts all partitions before reformatting, so I dug around the internet for various terminal commands that would force the partition to unmount, after several tries I found one that forcefully unmounted it then I reformatted it and re-partitioned it and now its all good again.

But very odd situation, given that even Disk Utility couldn't straight forwardly fix it...