Files are "Damaged and can't be opened" after running First aid Repair

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Level 1

8 points

Files are "Damaged and can't be opened" after running First aid Repair

Hi,

So I ran the disk utility 'first aid' repair on my HDD, and this has caused a huge amount of the files on my computer to give me the message "'-file-name-' is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash."

This even now happens for everything that I download, not just apps, anything I download will say it's damaged, so this is something more than just permissions not letting me run an app, even something as simple as a jpeg can't be opened. I have already tried putting permissions on allow anything just in case, this didn't fix anything.

I found a temporary fix by using terminal and typing 'xattr -cr -file-name-' . This allows me to open any file affected by this, however as soon as I close the file it goes back to saying it's damaged and I have to run the terminal line again every time I want to use a file affected by this. So the files aren't really damaged, something happened during the first aid that messed up however the computer is reading the files, I don't know how to use a hex editor so I have no clue what to change on these files, I'm hoping one of you will know more about this.

Any help is appreciated, thanks.

Posted on Feb 17, 2020 1:47 PM

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Answer 1

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MrHoffman

Community+ 2024

Level 10

119,909 points

Feb 17, 2020 1:50 PM in response to wlf65

First, do you have complete and current backups? If not, start with that, as one possibility here is a hardware failure.

Does this problem persist when booted in Safe Mode?

Then, do you have any add-on anti-malware, add-on anti-virus, add-on cleaners, add-on VPN clients, or add-on firewall-network-monitoring apps? If so, remove all of those per the vendors’ instructions, reboot, a d try again.

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Answer 2

wlf65 Author

Level 1

8 points

Feb 17, 2020 4:25 PM in response to MrHoffman

I tried Safe mode and it still persists, I also got rid of malware bytes, that was the only anti-malware app I had.

I have another hard drive from a year ago. Strangely, I plugged that one in and tested files from that mounted harddrive and those also said damaged, but when i booted straight into that drive all the files worked and even the files I viewed from this drive worked from that old drive. So I know for sure none of the files are actually damaged there's just something going on with this drive. I'm going to transfer some of my main files over to the old drive and then use that one to partition this drive and start it over. When i originally installed this new drive I didn't use GUID which made it so i could never update my system, so at least i can start that over and do it correctly, hopefully it'll get rid of the problem.

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Files are "Damaged and can't be opened" after running First aid Repair

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