Is Disk Utility running?

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Cowboy.mouth Author

Level 1

8 points

Is Disk Utility running?

How to I determine if the hard drive is damaged or if the erase process is just slow?

I am running an erase on a new 5 TB external drive and I get no response from the detail window after 2 hours.

I used a terminal command I found on another Apple support community discussion thread:

ps -ef | grep fsck

I understand that a series of the same two command entered will return results that can be used to determine if the process is hung or if it is working.

The first time I ran the terminal command, the return was:

501 28615 28608 0 5:36PM ttys000 0:00.00 grep fsck

The second time I ran the terminal command, the return was:

501 29492 28608 0 7:37PM ttys000 0:00.00 grep fsck

Does the second set of numbers (28615 and 29492) mean that it is running?

Does the hours, minutes, seconds numbers occurring twice (0:00.00) mean that the process is hung?

Please advise.

Mac mini, macOS 12.0

Posted on Dec 1, 2021 5:55 PM

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Answer 1

Cowboy.mouth Author

Level 1

8 points

Dec 2, 2021 5:27 AM in response to Cowboy.mouth

I solved the problem.

I let the ps -ef | grep fsck run all night and did not successfully erase the drive.

When I forced quit the process, the before and after returns from the terminal command changed only the second digit group and not the clock group. I infer that the process was not running before and after I forced quit. The clock track the elasped time of the process while the second numbers ((28615 and 29492) in the above example is a ID number.

I used my old Mac Pro (2010) running High Sierra (10.13.6) to unsuccessfully erase the drive in the above process.

However, when I plugged the drive into my new Mac mini (M1 2020) running 12.0.1, I was able to erase the drive and then partition quickly.

The drive was a WD_Black game drive with an ex_fat format, probably with additional and special formatting for games. It was the fastest external hard drive that I could find for the price (not including SSD and nvme ssd drives). Out of the box, it was unreadable, but with erasing and partition, works well.

I will use two of these external hard drives on my Mac mini: one for live data and one for time machine backups. Both drives have a 500GB bootable drive with a Mac OS and a second 4.5 TB (4500 GB) storage drive.

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Is Disk Utility running?

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