Trout

iTrader: (1)

I have recently been through some restructuring of my offline storage and cleaned up some disks.

In the process I decided to start again with my Time Machine backups. I formatted the disk to be the same format and as my startup HD and set Time Machine to run it's initial back up.

After many attempts it has not succeeded.

There is around 150GB to back up and it always fails around 42-44GB stating that there may be a disk error, but it may be temporary and so please try again.

I have repaired both the start up HD and the back up HD. I have formatted that several times now.

My latest attempt was to ignore the error and restart the back up. If I do it seems to start where it left off, so if it manages 40GB the first time, the second time it states only 110gb to back up.

After more and more restarts as it got closer to the end, it then seemed to finish - but it didn't.

It said 8.0gb to back up, and when it got to 8gb, both numbers started to rise in synch until they both got to about 20gb and then it failed.


I have trawled the forums, I have repaired permissions, matched the disk formats - I have now run out of ideas.

Any other ideas from our Mac experts?



PS I am getting nervous now as iPhoto is still broken and now TM won't work - although there 'seems' to be nothing wrong with the machine!!

ChefDude

so the OS/start up drive is the one failing at the 40 gig mark?

hodgy0_2

i am no MAC or Time Machine expert

but just reading your post Trout - my next troubleshooting exercise (if possible)

would be to do a backup of 35Gb -- and see if the backup is successful, this would tell me that the actual backup services/software is working

it would then point to some limit being hit somewhere

Markus

A few Q's, what OS, and what are you backing up to? Is it a time capsule, or just an external disk? If it's a TC then I know someone else had theirs fail on them, so this could be the start of a failure and if it's under warranty, drop into Apple and get them to look/sort the issue.
If it's an external then the drive could be on the way out, so it might be time to replace the disk.

I'd try copying large files to the disk and see if you get I/O errors, the finder will usually moan if it's getting an error reading or writing to the disk. If it reports errors then it's probably a borked disk.

Trout

iTrader: (1)

Some good thoughts I will try when I get home.

It is OSX 10.6.3

It is Time Machine with a newish external drive - I did try to set it up as an Airdisk on the Extreme but it was extremely temperamental hence me starting again with it as an attached drive.

As far as I can tell the external disk seems to be fine - It had 300gb of data on it before I put new partitions on it and reformatted. It has had no problems on this and disk utility has not revealed an problems with either the start up or the attached disk.

The fact I am having problems with iPhoto and the back-up does seem to indicate that there is a potential disk problem with the start up disk which is worrying!

Trout

iTrader: (1)

I have been transferring my photos manually and many are corrupted or unreadable - disk errors.

Neither Disk Utility or iPhoto are seeing an issue and yet there is clearly a hardware issue with the disk which looks like it is on it's way out. I have a series of small niggly problems

Fortunately it was upgrade time anyway and new Macbook is on its way!!!

Markus

Oh ****! Sorry to hear that David. I don't overly trust DU as I have had it say all is fine when it's clearly not.

You may want to grab a copy of Disk Warrior or Tech Tool for future use. I've used them in the past and they have picked up on errors that DU didn't and in some cases fixed problems and allowed me to get data from a failing disk backed up.

hodgy0_2

annoyingly computer error messages are usually 100% correct

Trout

iTrader: (1)

I already had SuperDuper (and forgot) which I used for the HD upgrade I did a couple of years back. The Macbook has been around the world at least three times in my rucksack as well as back and forward to London every week. It got a knock when I was last in the US so that may have been it.

Anwway - with SuperDuper I have managed to finally get a solid, bootbale back up. There were around 100 photos (out of 8,000) that were corrupt. 1 track on iTunes out of around 7,000 and a bunch of files relating to Grapher (which I have never used so just deleted). It took some time to isolate the corrupt files/sectors - but they are all deleted now.

HD has now been reformatted and I am restoring back to the Macbook HD. Let's see how it runs.

Once I had deleted some of these files it definately started to run a little sweeter.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Trout

iTrader: (1)

It is all up and running again now. All the errors I had seem to have gone. I had one chuntery disk moment but no issues seen and it is running sweetly now.

MMT WRX

So what's a Time machine then?
Is it like a NAS or something?

SwissTony

iTrader: (19)

Time Machine is Apple's automated backup software built into the OS
It is meant to be able to access all external drives and apple's Time Capsule.
(which is a NAS)

MMT WRX

Cheers Swiss

hodgy0_2

i would try and find out if the errors on the disk are hard or soft errors

if they are hard errors (physical damage rather than sofware corruption), it could be a sign that the disk is about to go south

Trout

iTrader: (1)

I suspect they are hard errors - but I am not too concerned. I have a solid back up and a new Macbook Pro in the post (my current machine is a series I).

I will get my new machine up and running and then replace the disk on this one (already done it once to replace a 100gb 5400 with a 200gb 7200).

One thing I have failed to find is a good analytical tool to check the disk at a hardware level - any suggestions are welcome.