Time Machine IS killing or corrupting disks

fsck_hfs is the background process that does the same work as DiskUtility's repair.
If you mount a drive that hasn't been unmounted cleanly, then OS X will usually run fsck on the drive before mounting it, because mounting a corrupted file system could crash your entire system.
Also, killing fsck is not a good idea, you kill it in the wrong phase, and your drive is worse off than ever before.

Further to my previous post, I contacted alsoft and they suggested part of my problem was that the "Detailed Report" option was selected. I ran DW on a different drive, de-selected detailed report and then ran it on the drive affected by the Time Machine; which it rebuilt.
It showed up quite a few errors created by the backup of the Time Machine, and I quote the report:

• 33 files had a directory entry with an incorrect text encoding value that was repaired.

• 631,436 flies had a damaged extended attribute that was repaired.

• 7 folders had a directory entry with an incorrect custon flag that was repaired.

• 78,758 folders had a damaged extended attribute that was repaired.
Incorrect vaues in the Volume Information were repaired.

Which suggests that Time Machine is causing problems for the backup disk.

I'm having similar problems:

External newertech USB2.0 case with Samsung spinpoint 400Gb hard drive.
Macbook Core duo 1.83GHz.

After trying to set Time Machine up, my HDD has refused to mount, I can't repair it, I can't even use disk utility to wipe it (it just hangs there, with no sign of progress "preparing to erase").

I connect it to a windows XP machine, format it in part in Fat32 and another partition in NTFS, and then connect to the Mac, which reads both, writes to the Fat32 without a problem, but again, when I try to reformat, i get it hanging at "preparing to erase".

The same is true if I try Disk utility on another mac, running 10.4, or booting from the leopard install DVD.

Although I still don't know what went wrong, I was able to format my drive and successfully make Time Machine work on it by moving it into another HD enclosure, one with firewire. My problem seems to be caused by the USB only enclosure I was using.

Yeap, Lacie 500gb drive here. Time Machine worked for 2 days then bam corrupted disk which Disk Utility cannot fix (it hangs!).

I think for now I will simply disable time machine and wait for patch 🙂

Same here Maxtor 800 gig shot.... Disk warrior has been running for 5 hours and no luck. This is a shame. Apple really messed up. Someone should sue. I have lost 10 years of work on this drive.

Same external HD will work in a MacBook Pro but always get corrupted if used from iMac G5. So, it is extremely difficult to troubleshoot but that is no coincidence.

Message was edited by: gmanrique

I got a corrupted disk error message on my brand new Seagate 500gig drive the next day, and have had problems since with IMAC "SBOD" problem which I never had with Tiger. Time Machine does not seem to work properly and that is disappointing. It was advertised as being a "seamless" backup solution, and yet here we are thrown into the arcane world of trying to diagnose hard drive failures. Apple needs to do something about this. They should not have released this product before it was reading. Next time I am waiting for the first patch release before I buy a version of the OS.

Hello

I have a brand new Iomega UltraMax 1TB drive (on FW400), just for TM. Set-up and performance was fine for around 5 days, then after a restart, I got the "Disk Error" message, was told it was read-only, and Disk Utility could not repair the errors. I know Disk Warrior doesn't support Leopard volumes yet, but thought ***, there's nothing in my TM which can't be replaced yet, so I'd give it a go.

Booted from the DW 4.0 CD, it found lots of errors (see below) and apparently fixed them. Disk Utility subsequently reported the disk as OK, and TM has been working fine again for the last 24 hours or so...

HTH

__________________________

• All errors in the directory structure such as tree depth, header node, map nodes, node size, node counts, node
links, indexes and more have been repaired.
• 19 files had a directory entry with an incorrect text encoding value that was repaired.
• 608,209 files had a damaged extended attribute that was repaired.
• 30 folders had a directory entry with an incorrect custom icon flag that was repaired.
• 95,592 folders had a damaged extended attribute that was repaired.
• Incorrect values in the Volume Information were repaired.
• Critical values in the Volume Information were incorrect and were repaired.

[As a point of note, the TM disk has around 142K folders, and 684K files]

These posts about people running Disk Warrior in Leopard are scary. DW and TT Pro have issued warnings NOT to use their utilities in Leopard or on Leopard drives until they update them for Leopard.

MacFixit posted something today about LaCie drives having problems in Leopard. LaCie seems to be coming up a lot in the discussions here.

There is no reason to believe this diagnosis from a version of Disk Warrior that its maker has made clear is not compatible with Leopard.

I also had a drive that I thought was hosed by either TM or my MBP. I was using the original drive from my MBP in a cheap USB enclosure. It worked briefly and then was lost. Attached drive to a Tiger machine and tried running DW. No luck.

Because I kept getting I/O errors, I tried reinstalling the drive in the MBP, booting from and then reformatting from the install disk. It worked! My drive is back.

I don't know if mine is an issue with TM or the USB ports. Later, non-Time Machine-related file copy errors appeared. And I am having success with a Firewire drive.

So, if you are getting I/O errors, it might be the port. Try a direct install to revive your drive.

I have a Maxtor back-up hard drive 5000T and a LaCie DVD burner connected to an new iMac 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, and after installing Leopard, they were both easily accesible -- the Maxtor drive was backed up automatically using Retrospect. After starting up Time Machine and running it, the Maxtor drive no longer shows up on the desktop not on System Profiler. Tried rebooting and disk utility, but still can't access anything through my firewire port attached to the Maxtor. Clearly, starting up Time Machine was the cause of this problem. Unable to reverse this to date.

Marekboz, you might try reformating using disk utility found on the MacOSX boot dvd.

To do this, boot from MacOSX installation dvd, answer the first question on your language. When the next screen comes up, select 'Disk Utility' from the 'Tools' menu item. It might be something other than 'tools', but it is very easy to find. Reformat the drive. Quit 'Disk Utility', then quit the Installer which should force a reboot.

Alternatively, you might try this from Terminal:

diskutil list<return>

(Look for the drive name of you maxtor backup partition.) <== don't enter this.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/disk number_of_your_external_drivepartition<return>

The /dev/disk_number... should look like diskNs2 where N is a number. The
2 might be different if you have multiple partitions on the drive. You can also
use diskNs0 which should cause dd to zero the entire drive.

The second command will take a while. What you are doing by 'dd' is
zeroing out the drive partition. So that you can then reformat it with
disk utility. Be very careful here. If you select the wrong drive, then
you will wipe it out!

Last, if you have a linux or windows machine handy, you could just
format the drive in fat32 mode, then reformat under disk utility back
to HFS+.

Anyway, you choose to do it; you are going to loose the data on that drive, but the drive itself will not be lost. There have been enough people here who have successfully done this.

Personnally, I turned off Leopard TM until they get some of the bugs
worked out. To turn it off:

Take an 'empty' external drive, rename it to something that you will
never use again such as 'xyzzy", plug it in to the mac, let TM have
the drive for backups, then turn TM off in System Preferences and
last reformat the drive with a new name.

If you have already given TM a disk, turn off TM in System Preferences
and reformat that drive to a different name.

Hope that helps.

Message was edited by: Bob White

Move over guys. Count one more fatality. Death by TM. My external HD is a Silver 320 GB FW/800 Iomega. Disk Utility can't repair it. The drive shows up on the left side, but the volumes do not. It doesn't mount.

This external drive worked perfectly under Tiger 10.4.10. Now under Leopard, useless. I wonder how Jobs got TM to work without killing his HD during his keynotes presentation.