TimeMachine drive causing Mac Studio to restart

[danqi]

My Mac Studio developed a problem today, causing it to keep restarting during start-up (thus never actually booting fully). This was true for both safe mode and normal start-up.

I tried to repaid the disk using Disk Utility in Recovery Mode and it worked, but everything took forever. Even just starting Disk Utility while in Recovery Mode took 20 minutes or so. Each repair step also took forever and I repeatedly thought it had frozen completely.

When I tried booting again the problem persisted. That is, until I disconnected my Time Machine drive (a very large WD mybook HDD, connected to one of the old-school usb 3 ports).

For that reason I am suspecting that the hard drive was the cause of the issue.

Would this be something that could be fixed by reformatting the HDD? Or should I return it to WD (I need to look up if I still have warranty)?

 

[niteflyr]

WD Drive Utilities software can test and give a lot of info on the drive. You can get that here.

Western Digital Support | Western Digital

Find detailed answers to your support questions for your Western Digital products.

support-en.wd.com

 

[danqi]

I've never thought about using the official software! 😂

Always assumed it was... probably not so good. Will check it out!

 

[danqi]

WD Drive Utilities software can test and give a lot of info on the drive. You can get that here.

Western Digital Support | Western Digital

Find detailed answers to your support questions for your Western Digital products.

support-en.wd.com

Unfortunately, it seems like the WD Drive Utilities app doesn't work with WD Elements Desktop drives..

 

[weaztek]

When I tried booting again the problem persisted. That is, until I disconnected my Time Machine drive (a very large WD mybook HDD, connected to one of the old-school usb 3 ports).

I've never heard of a Mac crashing for such a reason, but let's narrow it down.

1. Start up the Mac with the ext. drive not plugged in at all. If it starts up fine, the hard drive (or hub) could indeed be the problem.

2. Start it up with the hard drive plugged directly into the Mac (bypassing the hub). If everything works, the hub could be the issue.

 

[danqi]

I've never heard of a Mac crashing for such a reason, but let's narrow it down.

1. Start up the Mac with the ext. drive not plugged in at all. If it starts up fine, the hard drive (or hub) could indeed be the problem.

2. Start it up with the hard drive plugged directly into the Mac (bypassing the hub). If everything works, the hub could be the issue.

I've never had that happen before either.

I am not using a hub, the HDD was always plugged in directly.

Before I disconnected the hard drive my Mac was caught in a boot loop no matter what I did (safe mode, etc.). Only when I disconnected the hard drive everything started working again. So it's pretty clear it was the problem.

Since it's an expensive hard drive and out of warranty I will do some tests tomorrow. I will format it and restart my computer and see what happens....

 

[danqi]

Here's an update: I have re-formatted the drive and everything seems to be working normally again.

This does seem a bit strange to me. I would have thought that when a drive causes a computer to reboot constantly (which this drive definitely did) the issue would be related to the hard drive's controller/interface/something like that, and not be related to it's contents or formatting...

But if it works it works, I guess.