Sparse bundle - resource temporarily unavailable - how to fix?

I too am getting this error. Not the first "issue" I've had with Leopard and disk images. 😟

Did anyone ever answer this question? I'm seeing the same problem with a TimeMachine disk that has been pretty trouble free until now. Is it simple another bad error message that's trying to tell us that the disk image has become corrupt?

I'm sure there are more of us out there with this issue. Any geniuses care to comment?;-)

cheers,

Mick

I can no longer mount my time machine backup image. I keep the backups on a 10.5 Server, we were about to role time machine out as our primary backup solution. I might have to rethink that. Does anyone know of a way to repair these images? I can't mount it on the server wither. While checking the volume it get the following warning... "The Disk image you are opening may be damaged and could damage your system. Are you sure you want to open this disk image?" I can try and mount it, but I still can't access any of the files inside.

Same exact problem here. Time machine worked great for me with 10.5.1, but I have had nothing but problems since moving to 10.5.2... Any suggestions???

I'm having the same exact problem. Backups seemed a lot slower, and seemed to fail a lot after upgrading to 10.2.

My disk was unavailable a few days ago. I seemed to gain access again through a series of restarts and running disk utility from the host machine on the entire drive (not that they found anything).

Now, it's doing it again, but I can't seem to fix it.

When I try to open the bundle from the finder, it just silently fails.
When I try to verify it from the disk utility, I get the "resource temporarily unavailable" error.

I had this happen to me yesterday, and I was able to make the problem go away.

The problem started when I connected to my shared drive and tried to mount my macbook's Time Machine .sparsebundle on my new macbook pro (out of curiosity). Mounting the bundle seemed to take a long time, so I canceled it. Then, the macbook began to give the error about "Resource Temporarily Unavailable". I restarted the macbook, no luck.

The problem disappeared when I went back to the macbook pro and mounted the image again, letting it complete fully and then properly ejecting it with the eject button. That must have cleared out some kind of state, because after that the macbook could mount it just fine.

However, I also tried changing the time machine disk on the macbook -- changing it back to the same disk I used before. This may have cleared out some of the time machine historical records, so now the macbook is taking a really long time to do what should be a simple incremental backup. So, maybe I have to wait for time machine to do its whole backup again. But at least it's doing something.

Just went through this myself yesterday. Fortunately, I have a solution of sorts.

*THE SHORT VERSION*

If your Time Machine backups are failing with "resource temporarily unavailable", and you have disconnected everyone from them and restarted the Time Capsule/Extreme, and the problem still exists, do the following.

1. Put the disk on a regular Mac.
2. Run Disk Utility and tell it to Repair the volume.
3. Mount the disk image to make sure it's working (just double click in the finder, let it open, the eject it). I recommend this because the first mount seemed to take forever, so I suspect it's better to do it locally than after returning it to the network--besides, you want to make sure it's working.
4. Return the disk to the Time Capsule/Extreme
5. Watch as everything works as it should.
6. Post here that it worked (or not).

No, I have no idea how to do this with a Time Capsule disk. Can you slap it on a Mac? Or do you have to pull the disk and put it in a different enclosure? Someone please comment on the correct solution in this discussion thread.

*THE LONG VERSION*

You try to do a backup to a remote Time Machine disk image and it fails. The error message (if you find it) looks something like this:

..."Bulimia_001451
97ba38.sparsebundle" failed with error 35. Resource temporarily unavailable
No amount of futzing remotely with Disk Utility can fix the image.

That's because the problem isn't with the image, it's actually with the disk on which the image exists. A sparseimage is actually a folder (with a lot of files in it). I realized what was going on when I did an 'ls -l' from the shell of /Volumes/xxx/yyy.sparcebundle/token and got back that same "resource temporarily unavailable" error. So this has nothing to do with the image per-se, something is wrong with the backup volume.

My backups are to disks hanging off an Airport Extreme, if you are using a Time Capsule I'm not sure how you're going to do this. I simply pulled the disk off the Extreme, put it on my laptop, ran Disk Utility and told it to repair the disk.

Oct 10 01:11:59 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Starting repair tool:
Oct 10 01:12:00 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Oct 10 01:12:00 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Extents Overflow file.
Oct 10 01:12:00 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Catalog file.
Oct 10 01:12:03 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking multi-linked files.
Oct 10 01:12:03 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Oct 10 01:12:06 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Extended Attributes file.
Oct 10 01:12:06 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Incorrect number of Access Control Lists^[
Oct 10 01:12:06 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: (It should be 0 instead of 22493)
Oct 10 01:12:06 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking volume bitmap.
Oct 10 01:12:07 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking volume information.
Oct 10 01:12:07 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Repairing volume.
Oct 10 01:12:13 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Rechecking volume.
Oct 10 01:12:13 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Oct 10 01:12:13 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Extents Overflow file.
Oct 10 01:12:13 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Catalog file.
Oct 10 01:12:14 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking multi-linked files.
Oct 10 01:12:14 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Oct 10 01:12:18 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking Extended Attributes file.
Oct 10 01:12:18 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking volume bitmap.
Oct 10 01:12:19 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: Checking volume information.
Oct 10 01:12:19 Shadowfax Disk Utility[288]: The volume Bulimia Backup was repaired successfully.

"Incorrect number of Access Control Lists" is the error that is causing this problem. Both the Extreme and the Time Capsule have their own versions of MacOS disk repair utilities, but they are running on NetBSD, not OSX, so presumably there are subtle differences in the code. In this case they are NOT CATCHING THE DISK ERROR. They report no problems at all with the disk (I've checked the log files), but in fact it does have a problem. One of the files *inside the disk image folder* has an error which prevents it from being opened, or even stat'ed, and as a result the disk image can't be mounted.

I've submitted this to Apple Radar, bug #6001266.

I just fixed my sparse bundle. As you may know, sparse bundles are folders containing in their roots 3 files to store configuration and a folder for data. I just created another sparse bundle on my remote disk using the following settings in Disk Utility:
- Volume name: "Same name of my old sparse bundle"
- Volume size: 100 MB
- Volume Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
- Encryption: none
- Partitions: Hard disk
- Image Format: sparse bundle disk image

I backed up the 3 configuration files of my Time Machine (Info.bckup, Info.plist and token). Then, I replaced the 3 files of my Time Machine sparse bundle by the 3 files just created in my new sparse bundle. To be honest, I don't own a Time Capsule. I have a NAS that I can access from my PC using Windows XP. Ironically, Windows helped me to solve my problem. So I don't know If you can access a Time Capsule from Windows but if you are able to mount your Air Disk, you should be able to do the same.

Hello All,

As you did i also encountered this problem, I have looked for hours for a solution on the net and nothing works (at least for me) in my case my backup was on the time capsule.
All i needed is to restore 1 file so i needed to access the sparse bundle or by finder or by time machine.
I took a more simple way to solve it and it worked for me and i hope for the rest of you also.

1. locate you sparse bundle (extra disk or time capsule that is not really important)
2. right click on the file and click on show package contents.
3. a folder will open with a few files in it, there should be a folder called bands.
4. open the folder it might take a while as it can contain thousands of files.
now when reading the folder was finished a disk image appeared in my desktop with all the backups.
5. use time machine from the dock to navigate your backups as normal or just drag and drop from the disk image.

Good luck to all and i hope to hear from you if it worked for you.


Regards
Victor

Hello Victor,
I have a similar situation as Gordon and am only looking for one file off the incomplete TM backup. Following your instructions, I got as far as the Band folder but never got any images for the files contained in it and can't access the folder from TM. There are over 7,000 files but I left the computer to process for hours. I've gotten the backup to mount on my desktop, if that's any use, but still not able to open those files. They all come up as 8mb text files. Any suggestions?!
Thanks so much and best of luck to us all!
Anna

Same problem here. Cannot do anything with TimeCapsule. It just hangs with "Preparing backup".

Hello Anna,

I am sorry that i did not reply earlier but i was not available.
As i said after that it mounts on your desktop you need to open time machine and it will recognize your backup.
Do ot try to open the backup files straight of the desktop as you will get the same result as you had.
the moment the image is on your dektop open time machine.

I hope this helps you.

Regards
Victor

I noticed that after I fixed the disk (mine is also hooked up to an Airport Extreme), I was able to mount one of the sparsebundles quickly, but the other one took more than an hour to mount, apparently it was repairing it (this is while it was hooked up to my Macbook locally via USB).

Once that happened, the volume mounted properly and the backup is actually preparing this time, not just spinning forever (I hope).

I have a NAS DLink-323 I keep getting the error message "The backup disk image could not be created." I have created a sparse bundle on my flash drive and copied all the files to my Volume_1 on the NAS. The file is in
Volume_1/Backups.backupdb/iFerg/2008-10-08-124943/iFerg/TM.sparsebundle
with iFerg the name of my iMac
Is it buried to deep?
I have allot of experience with digging int PC's but will need detailed info on how to correct this problem (if you tell me to run a script you must tell me where and how to go about that.)