Chosen Solution
Hello all, I am in a midst of trouble where disk utility is failing to repair the drive. It gives me message ‘Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk.Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files". Now, what should I do?
Boot the Mac into Single User Mode by holding down Command+S during system boot after you hear the boot chime, you know you will have successfully entered Single User Mode because you will see a bunch of white text on a black background scroll by When the Single User boot sequence has finished, you’ll find a small command prompt at the bottom of the screen prefixed by a hash sign (#), when you see that type the following command exactly: fsck -fy Once fsck completes, if you see a “File system was modified” message, then you should run “fsck -fy” again until you see a message stating “The volume (name) appears to be OK” – this is standard procedure of using fsck Type “reboot” to leave Single User Mode.
If you receive this message from Disk Utility after replugging an external drive that wasn’t successfully ejected (or unmounted), it could be that the OS is already busy performing the repair in the background. Your Mac will not be able to mount the disk until after the automatic checks are complete. If the external drive’s activity indicator is blinking, but you are otherwise unable to access the drive, then some background process is working on your disk. To see whether this is the case, you can run the “process status” command in a Console shell: Macbook-Pro: ~ luthien$ sudo ps ax | grep hfs
605 ?? R 4:08.59 /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Resources/./fsck_hfs -y /dev/disk4s4 In my case, my external drive (which I use for Time Machine backups) was given the name “/dev/disk4s4”, and indeed the filesystem check program (fsck_hfs) command was still running. I let it do it’s thing for a few hours; when it was done, the disk was automatically remounted and could be browsed in Finder.
Hi timmcculum, In Mac there are several errors which is difficult to cumbersome whenever they encounter and “Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.” Is one of the most common error which occur when you use Disk Utility in a bid to solve a problem and Disk Utility has shrugged its shoulders and given up. So, if you are facing this issue, then try below mentioned few tricks: - 1.Backup Mac OS X: Before you do anything, makes sure you have proper Mac backup available on an external drive, which can come handy in case of data loss situation. For backup, you can either use in-built Mac software like Time Machine or 3rd party tools like Stellar Drive Clone, Carbon Copy Cloner, etc. 2.Attempt the last ditch repair: Do a last minute ditch repair, by booting your Mac OS X before the Apple logo will appear by holding down the Cmd+S button from your keyboard. Now, release it when the boot progress bar indicator will appear. This will boot you into Single User mode and things will suddenly go very Linux, with a text-based display. Here, you don’t need to panic. Just wait until the flashing text cursor appears and type the following command: /sbin/fsck -fyd If you see the following message at the end of the repair: FILE SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED
… then type the command again. Repeat another two or three times until you have a message similar to this returned: The volume appears to be OK Of course, you may never see this because even this trick might not be able to fix your disk. However, you might be able to make note of its output and do a quick Google search to check a solution of this problem. When you’ve finished in Single User Mode, type the following to reboot: reboot Note that you might not be able to enter Single User Mode if you have a firmware password set. You’ll need to temporarily disable it for further use. Additionally, on a Retina display the text will be tiny – but still readable if you move closer to the screen! 3.Final solution (use a commercial applications): Here, you need to use some 3rd party commercial applications like Stellar Volume Repair Software which might be helpful in repairing disk permissions and also solving your issue.
Nobody is answering the question. How do you get files off of a drive that won’t boot? The message says to back up your files, but nobody here is explaining how to do that.
Same issue. Hard drive failed completely. I’m not going to be able to access with anything. I don’t have a DVD with the OS. My guess is that I need to install a new drive, download a new OS, and install it. My only Mac is dead. I don’t have access to anything but a Windows PC. How do I download and install OS11 to my Mac with the PC? I do have a FAT32 USB. How?
I have decided my four year old Seagate 1TB drive has died, unfortunately it is my Time Machine. So with a new 2TB Seagate drive (remembering the original question of this string) will ‘restore’ in fact restore all my time machine ‘saves’ as well as the other files I have backed-up to this 1TB drive.
I have seen this quite often. What I do is plug the drive into ubuntu and copy the files to an external. You have to run the command: ‘gksu nautilus’ to be able to access the files due to permissions.
I have found the steps given in the link below have resolved issues a few times now when I run into a disk that fails to mount in High Sierra. https://mycyberuniverse.com/web/how-fix-… First time I ran into this issue, it was with a brand new WD Elements HD. I think I eventually found the correct information on Western Digital’s website, (which is referenced in the link provided). I ran into this issue again this evening with an old APPLE (Maxtor) hard drive from an old eMac… Seriously Apple - fix your tools… one shouldn’t have to find “obscure” terminal commands to do something that DiskUtil should be addressing, particularly if erasing or reformatting a drive… Note that this fix is one to try after other steps (restarting, single user mode disk check, etc.) if the drive has data on it that you need. In my case, I was not concerned with retaining any data from the disks involved.
My 2tb drive external drive is perfectly fine; it’s also new. The problem is with Mojave. Disk Warrior indicates the backup partitions are in use, so that is why DU cannot access them. This situation came up with the internal drive when I was downloading some files. DU gave the same message. I terminated the download, then DU was able to access the partitions. The question is: what is using the backup partitions? Then, how to stop this ‘improper’ USE. I think the problem may lie with Superduper backup cloning.
