Disk Repair Error (Time Machine Partition)

Do you properly eject the disk before unplugging it?
Do you use the drive on any other machines?
It could be that your external drive has some bad sectors and should be checked independently of your machine.
When you reformatted it did you erase the free space?
Does the drive have S.M.A.R.T capability? DU will show you if it does.

The volume Backup needs to be repaired.
Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.

I think this may well mean that filesystem is corrupted to an extent that Disk Utility ( and fsck) cannot resolve since the repair button is grayed out. For 10.4 Diskwarrior could be recommended as a repair utility, but it isn't very compatible with 10.5 and so is very much try at your own risk. This may well mean you are back to square one.

+if this works, shouldn't Time Machine have a check for that?+

Yes, it should. There was a fix for some drives in the 10.5.1 update. That might be the explanation if you started using Time Machine before the update:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306907
Addresses formatting issues with certain drives used with Time Machine (specifically, single-partition MBR drives greater than 512 GB in size as well as NTFS drives of any size and partition scheme).

I wasn't able to find a band-aid solution, so I zero'd out the entire disk, and repartitioned.

I know, Leopard breaks all the popular solutions, e.g. Diskwarrior .

This time I used the GUID partition map scheme, which an Apple doc mentioned to use with Time Machine and Intel-based Macs as opposed to MBR type...if this works, shouldn't Time Machine have a check for that??

Yes, the GUID partition scheme is recommended by Apple on the support site now. You could argue that it should have been picked up earlier (it isn't mentioned in 10.5 help files), though by making these types of post and sending Apple bug reports/ feedback they may well try to improve the situation.

I'm still on 10.5.1 and just noticed very similar errors tonight. Time Machine had been behaving appropriately up until now. I was able to repair the disk with Disk Utility but the next backup also failed. I'll probably wipe the drive and start over, although I agree with you, this significantly reduces the utility of Time Machine if I lose the last 2 weeks worth of backups. We'll see.

Darth

I've been continually plagued by the same problem since I first began using Time Machine and Leopard, although I am able to repair with Disk Warrior 4.1 and successfully run Time Machine again. But I suspect that restoring an entire partition from a Time Machine backup might yield unexpected results, because the error appears whenever I use Disk Utility to try to repair the Time Machine volume. I have many files on the boot partition I'm backing up (over 650,000) and I suspect that the Time Machine routine may not be robust enough to successfully manage a hierarchy so complex.

Laine

I've had a very similar problem. When I tried to put Leopard on the first time, it wiped out my hard drive directory... Disk Warrior to the rescue. I then bought a brand new internal SATA drive and an external firewire drive for the back up. I formatted both drives and did a fresh install of Leopard on the internal. So far so good-ish. All other weird Leopard bugs and issues aside for now, I am now getting the error message that my Time Machine backup drive (which has been working fine) is irreparable and needs to be formated as soon as possible.

I have the back up drive partitioned and the non-Time-Machine-backup partition, that is the normal simply-storage partition is working fine. The Verify Disk Permissions, Repair Disk Permissions, and Repair Disk are greyed out in Disk Utility. Here's what I get when I Verify Disk.

Verifying volume “G5 Backup”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid catalog record type
Volume check failed.

Error: Filesystem verify or repair failed.
Verifying volume “Scratch”
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking Extended Attributes file.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
The volume Scratch appears to be OK.

Is a re-format of the back up drive my only option? How did this happen? and How can I prevent this from happening again?

Thanks!



Message was edited by: Corey McNabb

Message was edited by: Corey McNabb

Thank you to everyone who has posted about this issue -- it just happened to me AGAIN this morning (this is my 3rd time), after I installed the 10.5.2 update. The first two times were right after I hooked up my external Iomega 500GB drive to use with Time Machine and I thought it was something I was doing. Then it seemed to work fine for a couple months so I thought the problem was over. Guess not! It is frustrating because I just lost about 2 months worth of backups. So finally I searched Apple's discussion forums and saw that I am not alone. However, no one was really posting a solution other than to say "reformat the drive".

So I did a Google search about this topic and encountered the following article. I have just gone through the steps he outlines and although I won't know for awhile if it works, I figure at this point it can't hurt to try. I hope this proves useful to others as well. (One note -- in his article, he says to skip the Erase tab and go right to the Partition tab. If you don't see the Partition tab, first erase your corrupt Time Machine backup disk and then follow his steps.)

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

Cheers ~