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Colonel Badger

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 30, 2008
369
49
I purchased a Lacie 500GB USB 2.0 disk a week ago for Time Machine. Since then twice Time Machine has failed with

"An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume"

and in the system log I see I/O Errors. The Disk Utility is also not able to contact the disk and becomes unresponsive for a long time while trying.

The first time it happened I rebooted which didn't solve anything. I then switched off and on the disk drive and this solved the problem. I ran Disk Utility again and had it check the disk and it said the disk was fine. After that Time Machine and OS X found the disk and backups continued correctly for the last 4 days until today when it just did the same thing.

The first time I swapped the port it was connected to (it was originally plugged in to a hub and is now plugged directly in to the Mac). Tonight I'm going to replace the USB cable to see if that helps.

The question is; Does this sound more like a hardware issue with the actual disk, than a cable or other issue? What else could be causing this (I've heard rumors that from 10.5.3 issues similar to this were introduced) ?

Help !!!!
 
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