What does Disk Utility First Aid alert mean?

Couchcowboy wrote:

HWTech, thank you so much for your comments! I went to Disk Warrior website and they say compatible with Ventura, etc., but say not compatible with APFS formatted drives. I believe they're referring to working on these drives and not to installing DW app on my Mac Mini M2 which is formatted APFS? The external hard drives are not APFS formatted, as I've noted.

Disk Warrior can be run on an Apple Silicon Mac, but will only be able to scan & repair HFS+ (aka MacOS Extended) volumes at this time. It seems Apple has finally released some necessary APFS documentation, but it will take time for developers to create an APFS repair utility as it will require lots of testing before it can be released.

As far as compatibility, is there any way to know? I went to web sites of Oyen Digital and it indicates it's ready for Windows or MacOS, but didn't mention anything specific about Apple silicon.

I've never heard of this brand, maybe another contributor will chime in if they know anything about it.

I just received a new Oyen external hard drive and hope to copy my ailing drive to it and then rebuild it's Spotlight index. Any feel on whether this has a snowballs chance of working?

If you have TechTool, does it include a SMART monitoring tool to access the drive's health information? Personally I have found that DriveDx does a much better job at collecting & displaying a drive's health information plus DriveDx has an option of saving the health report as a text file which makes it easy to post the report here. If DriveDx cannot be downloaded (the link has been broken for me for over a month, but others seem to be able to use it), then try using SMARTReporter instead (a bit harder to locate the health report...health attributes, but once located, the report can be copied & pasted here).

I personally will not do anything with a drive until I ascertain its health status because working with a physically failing drive usually makes a drive failure worse. Most standard utilities and even macOS are unable to handle errors produced by a failing drive.

Speakers wouldn't be an issue, do you think?

Doubtful if they are simple/basic speakers, but if they are USB speakers, then the possibility increases slightly.

As far as how the drives work, they all seem to work fine except for Spotlight. I can transfer, copy/paste, delete files, view files, etc on all drives. Just can't search them reliably on some things. Some folders seem to search OK, others can't find files I just saw in their folders and know are there. I connected same drives to my Intel iMac and Spotlight also didn't work correctly, I'm assuming the Spotlight index is messed up on the drives somehow, but don't know enough about how this all works to say.

You can try to force Spotlight to reindex the drive. Here is an Apple article with instructions:

Rebuild the Spotlight index on your Mac - Apple Support

If your external drives are using MacOS Extended file system and you want to use a third party file system repair utility, then I highly recommend Disk Warrior over any other utility. While I have used TechTool in the past (PPC days and early Mac Intel), nothing compares to Disk Warrior. I was able to run a recent version of TechTool for testing purposes and found it not to be worth the money as some of its features are not needed, or those features are limited and better served by other individual apps.

If you have already purchased TechTool, then first check the health of those external drives before attempting file system repairs (you may need to install a special USB driver to access an external drive's health information...not sure TechTool provides it).

FYI, I have seen reports on these forums and have personally experienced cases where some external devices (including drives) may not be compatible with Apple Silicon Macs (usually they will be older devices).

In addition, I have seen numerous reports on these forums with macOS 12.x+ (Intel & Apple Silicon) regarding other third party devices interfering with being able to access data on external drives. The most common is a Wacom tablet causing problems. From what I've read, connecting the external drives before connecting the Wacom tablet will allo all the drives & the Wacom tablet to work properly. If the Wacom tablet is already connected when mounting an external drive, then users have had issues such as you have described. Try disconnect all other external devices to see if your external drives are operating normally.

If these are external data drives, then I hope you are also backing up the data on them as well as the main boot drive.

Thanks for the update. Our organization has used their app for years. I thought years ago the developer was part (or made part of) the SoftRAID group which I thought was part of OWC, but I couldn't find that information again. I'm sad to see it go as it was a very well designed app especially for the average user.

You can use SMARTReporter instead which has a free version. It isn't quite as nice since it is a bit more involved in retrieving the health report, but it uses the same open source utility at its core to gather the information. To access the SMART health information/report from SMARTReporter, click the "Disk Checks" button at the top of the app window. Make sure "S.M.A.R.T" tab is selected just below the button, then click the "Advanced Tools" tab in the middle of the window. Click the "Show Attributes" button for the drive you want to check. Copy & Paste the contents of the window here. This is the other app our organization has used for years.

While there are other apps out there in addition to these, some of them don't report the health attributes correctly (in name), while other apps don't always present the details in an easy to read manner (at least for me since I am used to the command line output formatting of the report which both DriveDx and SMARTReporter use as well).

Edit: I did a little research and came across a post from another forum where they posted a download link for DriveDx from the BinaryFruit developers of DriveDx (not sure what the last version was...I would have to check next week for the last time I downloaded it). From reports on the other forum, the updating feature of DriveDx is broken since it seems that part of their website is down as well. So far I haven't found any information about the state of the company.

https://binaryfruit.com/download/drivedx/mac/1/bin/DriveDx.1.11.0.zip

Edit #2: The download is for a Trial / Demo version (14 days) which requires an activation code for the full product.

If you feel the drive may possibly be failing, then always check its health first since repairs won't work or will make the failure worse. FYI, Disk Warrior actually does alert to some drive failures and may refuse to run....I forget how DW works in this regard as I haven't used DW in many years now.

The Toshiba hard drive appears healthy with no bad blocks (this is the critical part), but like you mentioned the drive report shows the drive running hot for an extended period of time. I'm not entirely sure where DriveDx pulls that information as I've never seen it when using the underlying utility which actually pulls the information.

It should be safe to run Disk Warrior to attempt repairs (or at least as safe as it can be....the physical drive should not cause a problem).

Please post the complete DriveDx text report (use the "Save Report" button when selecting the top most item related to the external drive).

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