TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

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mhschmieder
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TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mhschmieder »

I've already tried hours worth of suggestions from Apple's site and other places, including booting in Safe Mode, removing all Login Items, etc.

As everyone knows, I have had one issue or another with Time Machine almost non-stop since buying the 2017 iMac and suddenly being forced back into using external drives for most stuff, and via USB 3 and/or USB-C.

By plugging the G-Tech 10 TB drive directly into the back of the iMac, I eliminated most, but not all of the problems, such as disc sleep during TM backups, causing a disconnect and a nightmare trying (even in sudo mode) to remove the failed backup.

Last night, I had to quit the cleanup action as I had to get to bed and be up for an early meeting. Maybe I should have left everything on overnight, but storms were expected. I seem to have been partially successful using Unix in the Terminal to delete the failed backup. But that action did not complete when I killed Terminal's process and shut down for the night.

That was the first time TM had failed mid-stream, since I switched to directly connecting it to the back of the iMac vs. using even the new Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) hub from OWC (which seems to have no way to defeat sleep mode, and even doesn't know when things are being used and thus shouldn't be put to sleep). Probably because it was the biggest recent backup.

Anyway, when I booted tonight, the Time Machine drive icon on my desktop was there but dimmed. Disk Utility showed the drive but not the partition. I've also never been successful in making multiple partitions on that drive, but that's another matter entirely.

Following suggestions I found on-line, made matters worse, or they just got worse on their own. Disk Utility spins its wheels no matter what order I do things in (all devices off at startup, etc.), if the TM drive is turned on. I even turned off TM and removed that drive as available to TM, to no avail.

The System Report shows the G-Tech drive no problem. I was hoping I could get Disk Utility to show it again so I could see whether the Mount button would work, but after eight reboots and different tactics, I still can't see the TM drive (much less the partition) anbymore in Disk Utility.

The one thing I do notice in System Report, is that my sample library drive, which is the exact same G-Tech model, lists the Available Space and the Writable flag under the Capacity information, in the info group for the partition. It also lists the Mount Point. All three items are currently missing for the Time Machine partition on the other G-Tech drive (but weren't way earlier). I even tried swapping the power cables and USB cables.

The other newly changed information under System Report, is that the bookkeeping partition used by the disk managers is quite different now. For the Library drive, it says "disk5s1" at 209.7 MB Capacity, with "disk5s1" as the BSD Name and "EFI" as the Content. The Time Machine drive shows it as "EFI", Capacity 209.7 MB, MS-DOS FAT32 File System, BSD Name = "disk4s1", Content = "EFI", and a Volume UUID!

Maybe I didn't notice that detail earlier. I suspect it's behind many, if not all, of the problems I've had with the Time Machine drive since I bought it. Maybe there was something done incorrectly with this drive at the factory, even though I bought two identical boxes?

The most important thing now though, is to find out how I can access the drive, much less the partition, so that whatever I learn on-line or is suggested to me, can at least be tried, as now I'm dead in the water after eight tries that have if anything taken me further from a solution.

I guess I should be thankful that it was my Time Machine drive and not my Library drive though. I do have full, and recent, standalone backups, at least. I was annoyed enough when my hard-won resurrection of that drive around the holidays, sacrificed all prior backups from when I bought the iMac last July.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mhschmieder »

That took a long time to write up, which might be a good thing, because a half hour later, the drive finally shows on my desktop, and an error message came up saying macOS can't repair the disk "Time Machine".

That's similar to what happened around Thanksgiving, and is why I had to regretfully sacrifice all earlier TM backups from the new computer, when I started over from scratch around New Year's.

I'll check back in if I make some more progress, but needed to document as I go along or I'll forget stuff, as it's easy to go down unexpected side paths while dealing with this sort of thing.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mhschmieder »

Strange; now it shows up fine, but to be on the safe side, I am running repairs on the Time Machine partition, as a TM backup was just about to kick in.

Repairs take a long time on a 10 TB drive. I hope it doesn't muck things up; that's why I reduced the possibility of conflict by shutting off Time Machine again right after it started the countdown, as at least that confirmed it can once again access the drive and use it, just as the desktop shows it and the file system as well as Disk Utility.

This may end up just being a case of how bad Apple sucks these days, with less and less useful feedback when long tasks are being run.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mhschmieder »

Definitely some problems with that disc, whether pre-existing or not. Here's the log from the first aid action in Disk Utility:

Repairing file system.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking multi-linked directories.
Invalid parent for directory inode (id = 6638766)
(It should be 19 instead of 18)
Invalid name for directory inode (id = 6638766)
(It should be dir_6638766 instead of temp6638766)
Incorrect number of directory hard links
The volume Time Machine could not be verified completely.
File system check exit code is 8.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
File system verify or repair failed.
Operation failed…

The banner, at that point, reads:

"First Aid process has failed. If possible back up the data on this volume. Click Done to continue."

At that point, the partition greys out (but not its drive) in Disk Utility, and takes itself off my desktop.

I guess I'll have to do this dance again, without Disk Utility, if I want to see if a TM backup will succeed on the drive at this point. That is, if a long patient wait after yet another reboot, finally shows the partition on my desktop as available.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mhschmieder »

After the drive became visible again, it ultimately failed, but I'm too tired by now to have stopped at each step to document, and felt confident that the only real solution was to reformat the drive and start from scratch.

It's only a couple of weeks of Time Machine backups that are lost, after all, compared to the more disastrous loss from the earlier problems late last year (though I have trustworthy standalone manual backups -- and multiples at that -- for everything). And I've mostly been composing and recording vs. making software installation changes, in that time.

The Time Machine recreated partition identifies everything correctly, and shows as Writable as well as having 10 TB Available, but the "EFI" tag still shows up in conjunction with a Volume UUID, unlike on the identical G-Tech drive partitioned for sample Library stuff.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mhschmieder »

The EFI partition SHOULD be there, and is needed as well as being harmless:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4038396

Not sure if my Library drive is the one with an issue in that regard, but it simply uses the BSD Name and then identifies its Content as EFI.

Based on Apple's discussion and advice above. it may well be that it's non-deterministic how this will be exposed to the user when they use tools like Disk Utility or System Report.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mhschmieder »

Here's a related discussion, that shows how to remove the EFI partition as well:

https://www.mede8erforum.com/index.php?topic=14019.0

I'm not going to do that though. The context for that discussion is quite specific, and unrelated to my setup or needs.

Still, there was some useful information there that I don't think was in Apple's Q&A.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mikehalloran »

The drive is defective.

There’s a reason I keep recommending a drive or array that connects via Ethernet—doesn’t care if the Mac is awake or asleep. You can set it up for Time Machine only—takes a few minutes. If you need one big drive, set it to Spanning. RAID 1 sets both drives to mirror.

https://www.wdc.com/products/personal-c ... -gen2.html

The difference between the 1st and 2nd gen is NAS speed—not important if using it for Time Machine (I buy used 1st gen and drop in new WD Reds). Changing the drives takes 30 seconds and a screwdriver.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by mhschmieder »

Mike, thanks for the feedback. I'll have to check the warranty and find the receipt and see if Fry's will exchange it for me.
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Re: TM drive not seen; causes Disk Utility to spin

Post by Martini Hill »

Hi guys! Sorry to highjack this thread.

Mike Halloran, I have a couple of WD My Book Live Nas drives that I was hoping to use as backup drives. When I am trying to backup files..DP as well as a ton of other content..Final Cut, Documents, Pics, Photoshop etc. I get a warning from (Chronosync), It advises me to disable the extended attributes. isn't that bad? Is this telling me that I will not have perfect file backups? Should I maybe pull the drives and install them in a traditonal external USB or FW drive? I haven't been able to glean much searching the web and you of course are the best at this stuff!

Thanx~Jeff

mikehalloran wrote:The drive is defective.

There’s a reason I keep recommending a drive or array that connects via Ethernet—doesn’t care if the Mac is awake or asleep. You can set it up for Time Machine only—takes a few minutes. If you need one big drive, set it to Spanning. RAID 1 sets both drives to mirror.

https://www.wdc.com/products/personal-c ... -gen2.html

The difference between the 1st and 2nd gen is NAS speed—not important if using it for Time Machine (I buy used 1st gen and drop in new WD Reds). Changing the drives takes 30 seconds and a screwdriver.
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