Time Machine IS killing or corrupting disks

On installing Leopard on a newer imac, TM required a reformat of my ~4 year old Firewire connected FAT32 External Maxtor 5000T HD. Initial reformat went fine, but after first backup the disk has become corrupt.

After lots of troubleshooting, I've had some luck. I switched from FW to USB, and tried Repair Disk with no luck, but after removing the non standard name- Mike's HD, to just MAXTOR, it appears to be working again.

Has 10.5.1 cured some of these TM issues?

SOLUTION (kind of)
I have a 17" MBP and bought a MyBook Western Digital 1TB external to use with Time Machine. It reported an error when trying to erase the disk. I did every kind of formatting option, including NTFS (which worked on my PC) but everything resulted in an error when I tried to use it with Time Machine.

However, when I made the drive 2 partitions (one 835gig and the other 109gig, the most allowable) using Disk Utilities, suddenly everything was fine. Would prefer to be able to use the other 109gig for Time Machine but I guess I'll just use it for photos for now...

These are the dual-drive units? that means it sees the set (which are in a RAID mirror or stripe usually) as one volume, and you then partitioned it in Disk Utility. But you have a RAID bridge between the drive and you (or between it and OS X plus TM).

I just got bitten by this too. I've had TM running OK for a few weeks. Then I switched it off so it didn't clash with a cloning operation I was about to do on two different drives. After the clone was complete the TM disk (a WD 500GB in an external USB case) can't be mounted and of course TM can't see it. Disk Utility can't repair it and reports "Invalid extent entry".

There's no way this is coincidence - it's all over the net.

I had the same issue... your not crazy... I sent a scathing letter to apple. I lost some 6 years of photos thinking my TM backup was safe for 6 hrs.

I had mounting issues as well. I finally did a clean install and changes to a LacCie drive. Thus far no problems.

I think Apple has acknowledged that there seems to be problems with certain kinds of drives. Can't remember where I saw the post.

your definitely on to something and I think they are aware but are not making a commercial about it.

Anyone with only one backup routine, can't blame anyone for not having more backup sets. DVD, a couple disk drives. SuperDuper in the past to make clone of your drive?

One backup set is never enough, and one set should always be off line.

TM is less than a month old for us. There are questions.

Zero a drive at some point, so you can rule that out. And check to see if there are I/O unrecoverable disk errors, bad blocks, attempts to use spares; and get a copy of Disk Warrior and SuperDuper.

When SD and DW are out and tested for 10.5.1+ compatibility then you have some maintenance tools to help. SD is suppose to be able to clone a TM hard drive.

I see external hot swap FW cases, where you pop a drive out, insert a new drive, put the old drive and its sled in a safe location. 500GB+ as floppy.

This just happened to me as well. I bought a new Firewire drive (Buffalo 500Gb) formatted it HFS+, ran Disk Utility to make sure it was fine.

I let TM run last night with no other apps running (turned off iTunes, unmounted all misc disk images,...).

TM completed successfully!!! Yea!!! But now the device is corrupted and Disk Utility says is cannot be repaired. Boo!!!

Message was edited by: Casey Kiernan1

What's so frustrating with all of these reports is the inability to identify common threads. I had seen a writeup about a problem with eSata cards and Leopard, and it turns out that it was specific to a narrow set of drives (WD MyBooks and SeaGate FreeAgents), paired with a specific version of firmware used in a particular eSata card. That's the kind of detail I think we're going to have to get down to.

Are there any common elements that are coming to the surface with the people that have had drives corrupted? Think of all the variations that we're facing:

How is the drive connected to the Mac - SATA, FW400, FW800, USB (using either the built-in connections on the computers, or via add-in cards)

Maker of the drive/firmware - Apple (which I know OEMs other vendors' products, but it's unique firmware), Western Digital (WD), Seagate, etc.

Architecture of the drive (SATA or PATA)

If it's an external drive, is it single interface (USB or FW400 or eSATA) or is it multiple interfaces (USB and FW400, or USB and FW400 and FW800, USB and eSATA, etc). It seems that the chipsets used to support combinations of interfaces has contributed to problems with drives in other situations in the past.

Architecture of the Mac itself (Intel, PPC)

Format of the partition (Mac OS Extended and Journaled, not Journaled, Case Sensitive or Insensitive)

Format of the disk (Fat32, GUID Partition Table or GPT, APM (Apple Partition Map), etc.)

And I'm sure many more variables! Yeesh!

Yet some folks are working fine - Anyone with particularly strong analytical skills seeing ANYTHING that resembles a trend?

I'm following the thread with great interest - I am using TM, so far without problems, but I have continued to do a .Mac Backup, as well, as insurance. Would love not to do two different backup strategies, but perhaps that's really the safest thing to do, regardless of TM issues!?!?!?

Have folks seen this thread -

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/apple/leopard-disk-utility-format-issue-screws-with-t ime-machine-but-theres-an-easy-fix-316573.php

or

http://tinyurl.com/327pme

An informative read...

Keeping fingers crossed!

I recommend today's MacFixit tutorial on Leopard.
They are following issues with 10.5.1 like Time Machine, and have been "on top" of the need to insure that a drive has a proper partition table.

Users of Intel Macs, if they have to format drives, have learned to go to Partition: Options.... and select GUID/GPL.

I use SoftRAID to wipe a drive clean of any formatting, just zero the first and last 100 sectors. GUID uses the last sectors for a backup volume table to compare to. Then use SR or Apple DU to format the drive, initialize, and create a partition.

WD has been saying "don't use anything but RE/RE2 for RAID" (and safe to use for non-RAID) so you would hope and think that their dual-drive RAID MyBook Pro or Premium drive cases would also use RE/RE2, but those cost more.

I had a pair of 160GB RE drives, Had trouble. Took a pair of SE16 500GB drives. Also had trouble. In both cases, I was using stripped RAID or non-RAID.

I began to think it was the Sonnet Tempo 2EP PCIe 1x 2-channel controller wasn't qualified for Leopard; was a SoftRAID 3.6.6b5 issue; was going to have to wait for 10.5.2. Those may be true.

On a lark I created a concatenated RAID after someone else had luck with theirs. That works. Not sure why.

FireWire: Oxford bridge firmware has had to be updated with every past OS revision, can't see why that wouldn't be true now, but seems like nothing has been said about Oxford bridges. OWC uses those in their FW/USB cases. So do some others. They tend to be very Mac friendly (Oxford, but OWC also).

Oxford was suppose to have an update to their SATA drive bridge (eSATA and FW800) that uses "924" but the "934" has never materialized.

I think it goes something like this:
911+ used in USB2/FW400/800
912+ FW800/400 - I think
922+ built-in FW800 RAID bridge
"+" means supports USB2 along with FireWire.
924 = quad interface eSATA plus USB2/FW80/400
934 = improved quad interface for SATA II

ERASE is not going to change partition table. And Disk Utility should make that first choice and obvious. When you insert a raw drive in Vista, it asks (me, x64 versions) if you want to use GUID or MBR. Then get to create one or more standard volumes.

I have a stop gap solution for people whose disks have been corrupted by Time Machine (and yes, it is Time Machine). This is not a perfect fix, its just a way to get your data back. It requires another Mac that is running Tiger. If you know how to downgrade to Tiger, that may work too. Apologies if this idea has already been posted in this thread.

First and foremost, TURN OFF TIME MACHINE!

Second, take the drive to a Mac that is running an older version of OS X (e.g. the last version of Tiger).

Connect the disk. It should mount on the desktop and the files should all be there.

Copy the files you need to another drive.

On the Tiger Mac, use Disk Utility to erase the disk. (If you had the problem as I had it, you could not verify, repair or erase the disk on the Leopard Mac).

Copy the files back to the newly erased disk.

Re-attach your disk to the Leopard Mac. It should work now.

And don't turn Time Machine back on or, if you do, make sure there is NOTHING on your backup disk but TM backup files.

Hope this helps someone to avoid some panic and dread!

External USB enclosure with laptop drive inside it. First attempt to use TM did the initial snapshot well, corrupt partition on the next mount. Re-partitioned and repeated - this time it lasted 2 days and several TM backup procedures. Plugged it in today and bang - gone again. Am now on 3rd attempt....

Grrrr...

Rich

Today I installed Leopard, and did a routine check of my hard drives, internal and external. Disk Utility reported damaged Volume Headers on all of them, except for the System drive! And that was straight after installing the OS. So clearly, even without actively using Time Machine, simply installing Leopard does damage to the disks. I repeated this twice with the same result. I use a 8-core Mac Pro and brand new Lacie drives.

Time Machine killed my RAID.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1301180&tstart=0

Ideas?