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William_Mize Author

Level 1

4 points

Getting Error 36 When Moving Files From Damaged Ext HDD to Another

I have a WD elements 4TB External drive that is giving me the click of death and this error message when I mount it:

I have tried First Aid and Disk Repair on the above Ext HDD and got this:

So I have gone out and purchased another Ext HDD to copy the files over to - brilliant!

Or so I thought.

Now, when trying to copy from one Ext HDD to another, I get this error message:

I've tried running dot_clean from terminal on the offending directories on the damaged Ext HDD, but that doesn't seem to work, probably due to the fact that the damaged drive is now effectively read only.

Any suggestions on how to get my data off the damaged drive and over to the new Ext HDD before it stops working altogether?

Thank you!

MacBook Air, macOS 12.6

Posted on Sep 22, 2022 3:32 AM

Top-ranking reply

VikingOSX

Community+ 2024

Level 10

116,789 points

Posted on Sep 22, 2022 4:02 AM

That -36 error is an I/O error which is not uncommon when attempting to access data from a damaged/corrupted drive. There is no magic to resolve I/O errors from that old drive since you already performed a Disk Utility First Aid and it failed.

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Getting Error 36 When Moving Files From Damaged Ext HDD to Another

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