Disk Utility and DiskWarrior trouble with external hard-drive.

I certainly hope I'm wrong, but if neither DW or DU can repair it, it sounds as though it has passed on/failed. There isn't much you can do about that - all hard drives can and will fail. I maintain two identical hard drives just for that reason.

As babowa implies more polietly, your disk isn't failing, it has failed:

Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failure (-36,2747)

Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

Speed reduced by disk malfunction: 339,474, er make that 340,239, er make that 341,327

😟

Get a new drive and back up immediately.

Then,

Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

Hi Baltwo

I am afraid that I am in the same situation as Jesse Smith1. Diskwarrior also says: Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failure (-36, 2747).

Your recommedation is: back up as many of my files as possible, reformart the disk, and restore my back-up files.

Can you explain me how to back up my files since I can not start the iMac and I am accesing just through fire-wire connection to it?

Looking forward to your answer

Thanks

M

marioclemente wrote:

. . .

Can you explain me how to back up my files since I can not start the iMac and I am accesing just through fire-wire connection to it?

Does that mean the problem is with the internal HD, and you do have it started in Target Disk mode, and are accessing it from another Mac?

If so, while running from the other Mac, copy what you can from the problem Mac's HD, either to the other Mac's internal HD, or (probably better) to an external HD connected to it. You probably won't be able to copy everything, and it's possible the disk will fail completely at any moment, so start with your most important files.

I'm having the same issue with a sparsebundle disk image that I used for Time Machine backup to a NAS. Disk Utility says it cannot repair the disk and Disk Warrior says Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failue (-36, 2747). I tried repairing with fsck as well and I get the same error (Resource busy) as Jesse Smith1.

I'm not sure how the file got corrupted. I tried to copy the image to a local disk and tried the repairs but got the same errors. Since it's a disk image rather than an external hard drive I believe this could be caused by some software issue. I'm not sure why Disk Warrior reports it as 'hardware failure'. It's 5 months worth of Time Machine backups so I would really like it to be restored. Please let me know if there is a way to fix this. Thanks!

I had similar problem yesterday. I have external USB drive with FAT and encrypted HFS+ partition. For no reason encrypted journaled HFS+ partition refused to decrypt and rejected correct password. FAT partition was working. I tried to scan it and repair it with disk tool only to get information on non recoverable hardware error. I was also advised to backup my data (encrypted and inaccessible - very funny). Disk Warrior said Directory cannot be rebuilt due to disk hardware failue (-36, 2747). I was repeating Disk Tool scan and repair operation over and over, always ended the same way but there was differences in scan duration. At the end of the day, when I was ready to give up after many hopeless hours, partition appeared out of nowhere in finder's sidebar. I copied all the data, what took all night and just finished scanning it with DiskWarrior. It found few errors and fixed them somehow. If not this sudden resurection I planned to put it into another mac (preferably not Mavericks) as this looked nothing like hardware failure. All S.M.A.R.T parameters normal.

Lesson for the future: backup your backup and use encryption only if you absolutely need it - otherwise you're left with jigsaw you'll never solve. Unencrypted partitions are possible to recover. I hope that my history will give you patience and some hope.

Hi Pondini, would you know a fix for the problem? I'm still not able to mount the disk from sparsebundle image. Is it an encryption problem? Is there a way to decrypt sparsebundle images? Would greatly appreciate any help. Thanks!

I know this is late but I thought that anyone looking for help on this would benefit.

The "DiskWarrior Error (-36 2747)" message may be the result of the OS trying to rebuild the directory preventing DiskWarrior for doing its thing. You need to find and kill this process.

type: ps -ef | grep fsck_hfs and you should get something like this:

0 67332 18 0 6:26am ?? 1:02.06 /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Resources/../../../../../../sbin/fs ck_hfs -y /dev/disk5s2

To kill it, type kill followed by the second number from the left, in this case: kill 67332

The disk activity stops, and you can then run DiskWarrior and see if it can fix the drive.

Do i have to do this in single usr mode or in standard usr terminal ?