Paragon Drivers knocked my drive offline and cannot be mounted or repaired by Disk Utility!

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8 points

Paragon Drivers knocked my drive offline and cannot be mounted or repaired by Disk Utility!

Hi all, for a little background on how I got here see the 2nd page of the post here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251171411?page=2

Long story short, I installed Paragon Disk Manager on my macbook pro 2012 non-retina, running El Capitan. Everything was working just fine, but I had a huge emergency with another machine (2012 iMac / Catalina) I used it on, where it hosed the hard drive horrifically.

In a semi panic, I decided I should uninstall the Paragon software from my mac and proceed to do so. I also decided I should immediately do a clone (restore) of my main drive to an external, just in case things went sideways. I restarted from a High Sierra install and on the attempt to do the restores they both failed and dropped the disks offline. On restart they both had lost their labels, could not mount. They are no appearing as only disk0s2 and disk0s4 respectively in Disk Utility and it can neither mount nor repair them.

I am absolutely terrified to lose these, as I am a big idiot who has not performed a time machine backup for a very long time... I have plenty of spare drives and think the best first step would be to duplicate what is there now, in case other repair attempts do worse damage. I am not a complete noob, and hope that I can do something to get back in working order.

I am 99% confident this issue is revolving around the Paragon software drivers, as review of the post I listed above makes clear their are issues, and I never had trouble with this drive system before the actions I took listed above. FWIW: I am thinking re-installing the Paragon software might be the way to fix this?

Please can anyone more experienced than me give me some direction, so i do not do anything more stupid than I already have? I would be forever grateful and am sure the universe will repay your kindness...

Signed:

a humble idiot in dire need of help...

PS: Screen shots that I hope might be helpful below...

Disk Utility screenshot, my main disk I hope to recover is the intel 512 listed first with two partitions:

MacBook Pro

Posted on Mar 13, 2020 5:39 AM

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Answer 1

Areyou486 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 13, 2020 9:24 AM in response to Areyou486

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Answer 2

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 14, 2020 9:38 AM in response to Areyou486

If the file system is not mountable, unless you create disk images of the individual partitions, there is no other alternative. You can use Unix dd commands or software like CloneZilla to create disk images. Disk Utility may not be very helpful in this specific case.

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Answer 3

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 13, 2020 10:16 AM in response to Areyou486

Can you post the current state of the disks from Terminal? Post the output of

diskutil list

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Answer 4

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 13, 2020 12:16 PM in response to Areyou486

We need to establish the correctness of the GUID types assigned to partitions. We usually dump a few blocks at beginning of each partition to see what is this header.

If you need an explanation of the command, please ask. Can you post the output of

sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk0s2 count=5 2>/dev/null | hexdump -C

Repeat the command for rdisk0s3/rdisk0s4/rdisk0s5.

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Answer 5

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 15, 2020 4:11 PM in response to Areyou486

Areyou486 wrote:

The diskrepair you are describing is a unix command, not a function of apple disk utility, correct?

It is a Disk Utility command.

diskutil repairDisk 
Usage:  diskutil repairDisk MountPoint|DiskIdentifier|DeviceNode
Repair the required layout and components of the partition map of a whole disk.
This attempts to cause compliance with the various requirements for macOS usage.
Whole-disks other than the target might also be touched as part of this.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.

I would boot from the recovery partition and run terminal then run the diskrepair command, correct. Or should I boot from a USB installer to do so? What would the actual command be other than diskrepair?

You have booted from an external boot disk, so a reboot into Local/Internet Recovery is not required.

ALso, if I wanted to use the dd command you mentioned to copy the partitions before repair... COuld you offer some details on how I would do that?

The dd command uses an input file (if=) qualifier and an output file (of=) qualifier. In your case if will be either /dev/rdisk0s2 or /dev/rdisk0s4. The of will be a file name on your external disk.

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Answer 6

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 13, 2020 9:13 AM in response to Areyou486

Your GPT is a mess. Can you download and install GPT Fdisk (https://sourceforge.net/projects/gptfdisk/) and then we can try to correct the issues?

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Answer 7

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 13, 2020 3:47 PM in response to Areyou486

Disk0s3 and Disk0s5 are HFS+ File systems, and are sized for a Recovery HD. It is reasonable to assume these are still intact. But, you have two Recovery HDs. Did you try to install a second macOS on this disk?

Disk0s2 and Disk0s2 do not show a known header. Does macOS Finder show any files? We can attempt a repairDisk, but it can worsen the current situation.

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Answer 8

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 13, 2020 5:41 PM in response to Areyou486

Areyou486 wrote:

Disk0s3 and Disk0s5 are the partitions on the drive I am desperate to recover!

These are 650MB Recovery HD. There is no user data on these slices. These are part of the physical disk disk0.

Disk0s2 and Disk0s2 are the external I am booting from to recover! No worries with that one :-)...

My statement

Disk0s2 and Disk0s2 do not show a known header.

should be

Disk0s2 and Disk0s4 do not show a known header.

Both of these are part of the internal disk disk0, not external.

So... It sounds like a good chance of getting Disk0s3 and Disk0s5 back online! I am so psyched! Just let me know what to do next!

Being online does not indicate recoverability, because the dd commands do not show a known file system. However, a repairDisk can be attempted. It may or may not address the file system issues.

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Answer 9

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 13, 2020 9:27 AM in response to Areyou486

Please uninstall HDM, before it causes further issues. Can you install GPT FDisk?

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Answer 10

Loner T

Level 9

59,536 points

Mar 14, 2020 8:46 AM in response to Areyou486

My recommendation is to try and Repair the two file systems using repairDisk.

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Answer 11

Areyou486 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 13, 2020 5:57 AM in response to Areyou486

PS: On a secondary note,

This problem started due to an upgrade of a 2012 iMac hd to SSD that I wanted to shrink volume using Paragon to fit on the SSD running Catalina. After doing so, the SSD came to a crawl and now that machine is crippled and cannot complete fresh install of OS. Any advice on "fixing" that issue would be appreciated...

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Answer 12

Areyou486 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 13, 2020 9:02 AM in response to Areyou486

On reboot recovery disks for both disks appear in the available startup disks when using option key.

When I install HDM, the disk now appear as untitled (greyed out) in Disk Utility as well as in HDM. In HDM, they show up as “unformatted”.

After uninstalling HDM, Disk utility continues to show disks as “Untitled” rather than the “disk0s2” shown before.

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Answer 13

Areyou486 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 13, 2020 5:30 PM in response to Loner T

Disk0s3 and Disk0s5 are the partitions on the drive I am desperate to recover! Disk0s2 and Disk0s2 are the external I am booting from to recover! No worries with that one :-)... So... It sounds like a good chance of getting Disk0s3 and Disk0s5 back online! I am so psyched! Just let me know what to do next! Thank you so much for your time!

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Answer 14

Areyou486 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 14, 2020 5:34 AM in response to Loner T

Hmm, well that's a bummer. So is there any hope of recovering the drives or files off of them? It sounds like you are saying, anything I do now to try and repair them, might make it worse? Is there any way to make a duplicate of what is there now on another drive, in case attempts fail badly? At this point I got Nothin' so if you can suggest something, I am game :-) Thanks again Loner T!

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Answer 15

Areyou486 Author

Level 1

8 points

Mar 15, 2020 7:03 AM in response to Loner T

Hey Loner T, The diskrepair you are describing is a unix command, not a function of apple disk utility, correct? I would boot from the recovery partition and run terminal then run the diskrepair command, correct. Or should I boot from a USB installer to do so? What would the actual command be other than diskrepair? Sorry to ask so many questions! I really appreciate your patience!

ALso, if I wanted to use the dd command you mentioned to copy the partitions before repair... COuld you offer some details on how I would do that? Thank you so much again!

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Paragon Drivers knocked my drive offline and cannot be mounted or repaired by Disk Utility!

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