You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

Seemingly unprovoked software corruption on external drive. Can I salvage?

I have an external disk on my Mojave system that seemingly had the volume name overwritten with another volume's name and now it won't mount and Disk Utility firstaid won't help. The problem may go deeper than the name overwrite. But I hope not.


I have an external enclosure containing two SATA drives I also have a "toaster" for dropping in other drives I have on my shelf. In the enclosure I have volumes "Drone Raw" and "Masters" - both mounted.


I pulled an older drive off the shelf also called "Masters" and dropped into the toaster. It mounted fine and I had two "Masters". I've done this before without incident.


Then something went awry and I am not exactly sure of the sequence. I think I unmounted the "Masters" in the enclosure. Maybe both. I can't be sure how I got here. But suddenly the Masters in the enclosure would not mount up at all.


When I used Disk Utility, it thinks that the volume name is now "Drone Raw" and it won't mount. The true "Drone Raw" mounts fine. If I try to mount Masters, it then shows two Drone Raw with one of them being unmounted.


The results of a First aid read:


"Repairing file system.

Volume is already unmounted.

Performing fsck_hfs -fy -x /dev/rdisk6s2

Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

Checking extents overflow file.

Checking catalog file.

Invalid sibling link

Rebuilding catalog B-tree.

The volume Drone Raw could not be repaired.

File system check exit code is 8.

Restoring the original state found as unmounted.

File system verify or repair failed.


Operation failed…"


I tried command line fsck_hfs -r and -f to no avail.


Is this drive hopelessly scrozzed? If so, more academically, why did this happen? I really wasn't doing anything creative or risky at the time.


Thanks for any help


Bill


iMac 27", macOS 10.14

Posted on May 12, 2020 11:35 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on May 13, 2020 9:33 PM

Try rebooting the computer. macOS and Disk Utility can get confused and need to be reset when this happens.


You can try using the paid app Disk Warrior to see if it can repair the volume.


If you need to recover data try using PhotoRec, TestDisk, or Data Rescue. Or contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Ontrack. If you don't need to recover data, then just erase the drive using Disk Utility.


In the future make sure to have unique volume names so you never mount two identical volume names. Normally macOS will append a number to the 2nd volume so the second "Masters" volume should have been labeled "Masters 1", but just the other day I saw that the Finder was not doing this properly. In the Finder it showed both volumes with identical names, but in the Terminal there was a difference with an extra " 1" appended to the volume name.


macOS, Finder, and Disk Utility are very poor at handling drives and volumes. And with each new update things seem to get worse. I never have such issues using Linux or Windows. It drives me crazy.

Similar questions

1 reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

May 13, 2020 9:33 PM in response to n2asa

Try rebooting the computer. macOS and Disk Utility can get confused and need to be reset when this happens.


You can try using the paid app Disk Warrior to see if it can repair the volume.


If you need to recover data try using PhotoRec, TestDisk, or Data Rescue. Or contact a professional data recovery service such as Drive Savers or Ontrack. If you don't need to recover data, then just erase the drive using Disk Utility.


In the future make sure to have unique volume names so you never mount two identical volume names. Normally macOS will append a number to the 2nd volume so the second "Masters" volume should have been labeled "Masters 1", but just the other day I saw that the Finder was not doing this properly. In the Finder it showed both volumes with identical names, but in the Terminal there was a difference with an extra " 1" appended to the volume name.


macOS, Finder, and Disk Utility are very poor at handling drives and volumes. And with each new update things seem to get worse. I never have such issues using Linux or Windows. It drives me crazy.

Seemingly unprovoked software corruption on external drive. Can I salvage?

Welcome to Apple Support Community
A forum where Apple customers help each other with their products. Get started with your Apple Account.