Disk Repair utilities: what tools, what tricks? (1 Viewer)

[DaveF]

My wife's Time Machine drive, 6-month old external hard drive, suddenly developed problems preventing Time Machine from functioning. Disk Utility is unable to verify or repair the disk.

What other tools are good for investigating disk repair issues? I'm not sure how severe the problem is yet. Some options are:
* Call AppleCare. It might be a Time Machine or OS X induced problem.
* Call Seagate. It might be the drive is failing.
* Run fsck. Not sure if this is appropriate for a non-boot, external disk.
* Buy a disk repair program. Seems silly to spend $100 on a utility to repair a $100 disk.

Are there other tools, command line or otherwise, I should try?

My fear is that 10.5.3 introduced drive-corrupting bugs into Time Machine. I've seen similar problems and I had to run DU's disk verify & repair on my own TM disk last night too.

 

[JohnRice]

Sometimes the best thing to do is completely wipe the drive with Disk Utility, making sure to actually over-write all info. Choose this in "Options". One over-write is enough.

Beyond that, Disk Warrior is a must have. Don't think of it as a one time use thing. You should run this regularly on all drives.

 

[DaveF]

We may have to do that. But, as always, I'd like to save all the data before wiping it.

 

[LDfan]

Spinrite

**Home of Gibson Research Corporation**

Every week in his SecurityNow podcast (which is great btw) there are always a few added emails from listeners chiming in with Spinrite stories.

This program has been around for a long time. It has saved my butt many times. For a Mac you will have to pull the drive and load it into an intel-based PC to run it.... hmmm, which now that I think about it maybe it will work on a newer intel-mac??

Anyways, this program does kick serious butt. Will fix Tivo drives and I've read countless stories of people restoring their dead ipods to like new condition.

I ponied up the money ($89) and it is now a must-have tool in my favorites for fixing computer problems.

Jeff

 

[JohnRice]

Dave, I'd lay good money that Disk Warrior will make the drive usable. Then extract the info, wipe it and start over.

 

[DavidJ]

What he said...

Disk Warrior is awesome and I've had to do this very thing before. Most recently when upgrading to Leopard with a faulty SuperDrive. I got bold and did it without making a proper backup first. The drive became corrupted and nothing and I mean nothing would work on it until Disk Warrior. I got the data off it that I needed and then wiped and reformatted it. Worked like a charm.

 

[Brian-W]

Um...don't look at it that way. Look at it as "how valuable is my data?" If you can't live without it, then $100 is a trival cost.

 

[DaveF]

It was Time Machine backup data and could be lost; the originals are all intact.

And so it was.

I fought with the drive and tried all free recovery options I could think off, but something on it was toast. We lost the data. I set up my smaller external drive for a temporary Time Machine system and sent this one back for warranty replacement.