Disk utility gives "Error: Partition map repair failed while adjusting structures to fit current whole disk size"

Just tried the 3tb Hitachi Touro, and yep, I get that error when verifying the root disk I guess its called.

It works fine on the named disk volume itself.

While my 3tb Goflex was hit and miss mounting yesterday, today it mounted on the two bootups I just did.

While I would've gone with the GoFlex as being a wacky POS, it does seem it has something to do with DU addressing hdd's 3tb and bigger as people are saying. IOW, Apple bug.

While its not necessarily a disaster it could be an explanation as to why the drive mounting is hit or miss on this new mini.

I didn't have that problem with both these drives not mounting when connected to my pc laptop or my macbook using Tiger and Snow Leopard.

When I was in the process of transfering my archive to both of these drives a while back using the macbook, I was moving large amounts sometime...2-300 gb's of data... in one gulp without any hiccups on either of those disks.

Mike Stand wrote:

Just tried the 3tb Hitachi Touro, and yep, I get that error when verifying the root disk I guess its called.

It works fine on the named disk volume itself.

Hello Mike, Thanks for trying this out. I guess that shows that it's not mostly a seagate problem but more of a mountain lion - 3T disk utility software bug.

Q: Has anyone been able to reproduce this on a drive that is less than 3 TB?

Yes.

A 2TB Hitachi Touro—and I have posted about that several times in this thread—indeed my first post about this drive is the fourth one in the discussion thread and dates back to August.

Please, rather than beating a dead horse, go file a bug report. If you will read back through this thread you'll see that over the last five months this issue has been thoroughly explored by users and t's been clear for a month or more that this is an Apple/Mountain Lion problem. Apple has yet to address it. Please encourage them to do so—thanks!

P.S. If you read back up the thread you will run across the link to file a bug report.

It's been about a month since the last entry in this thread. Does anyone know if the latest build of 10.8.3 fixes this issue? I've been holding off buying a 3TB external drive until this gets fixed.

Holy moly! It does seem to work! Well, at least no more error message. And it seems to be a difference in the build number on Disk Utility: The version number didn't change (it was 13), but the build number went from 430 to 444.

I haven't had a chance to try it out to see if this fixes the problem of using the drive as a backup disk attached to the Airport Extreme, but it looks good. Gee, that only took, what? seven months for Apple to fix it. And Apple didn't even have the decency to list it among the bug fixes for this release.

Not me. However now I get a somewhat different message instead:

"Error: The partition map needs to be repaired because there’s a problem with the EFI system partition’s file system."

Whereas originally it was:

"Error: Partition map repair failed while adjusting structures to fit current whole disk size."

I'm getting it on both my 3tb Hitachi & Seagate

Disk Warriored both as well.

Of course this is a problem with the drives top heirarchy and not the partitioned drives themselves.

*sigh* this is ridiculous

Mike, I'm sorry that it hasn't been the magic bullet for you. I'm sure you have thought about it, but it might be worthwhile to try reformatting the the disk with the newst build of Disk Utility. Of course that woiuld wipe all your data.....

ALso, an update: I connected my 2tb Hitachi Touro to my Apple Extreme this morning and it has been merrily backing up all day via Time Machine. It's got about another six hours to go, but it is working. The real test will be over the next day or so to see if it continues to keep working....

I agree that 10.8.3 fixed the problem. However, in scanning the release notes I could not find a specific reference. The closest was 3TB relative to BootCamp. Seems odd that an issue this big was not specifically called out. Maybe Apple's attitude is that if it is never acknowledged there never was an issue!

Thanks. Yeah, I was thinking re-formatting might do it. However, I believe Apple says somewhere its not really a problem and that the drives will work. The only 'problem' I experience is sometimes they don't mount so I turn them off and on again. Otherwise they seem to work fine.

Both those big drives are were I keep my files archive and each one is a backup of the other in case one fails.

So I guess if it really bugs me I'll reformat with ML.

With thousands of computers in my Universities domain, we've run into this problem serveral times now. It is a Mountain Lion issue on some hardware, mostly MacBook Pros with SSDs and 10.8.5. It is less frequent with 10.8.4. If you downgrade to 10.8.3, it should fix the problem. We are waiting until we fully support Mavericks thus I can't confirm if it exits there too. Until then, the issue needs to be identified and fixed by Apple with an update to 10.8.5.

I'm attempting to migrate from a late 2009 iMac (comventional rotating disk) to a new MBP Retina with an SSD using a TM backup on a Newer Technology OWC EHD. Both computers are running the latest version of Mavericks. On the iMac Disk Utility gives no error messages, but this issue shows up when I run the MBP Disk Utility on the same drive.

So, I'm going to try the migration anyway. Hope I don't crash and burn.

I was getting this error and it ended up being a bad hard drive cable. I had installed Crucial SSD. I followed Crucial advice and bought a SATA-USB cable to boot from my SSD remotely (Option on Startup), and it booted fine, albeit slowly. Bought a new cable from Ifixit and just installed it, and now things are working great.

I am having what seems like the identical problem (with a Hitachi Touro 2TB USB Disk). And I have scrubbed the disk, reformatted with with a single partition and ... still the error persists.

Tim

I have this problem with a Seagate GoFlex Desk 3TB USB 3 in a MacBook Pro Retina, I'm really angry because this bug has generated in some important files has been corrupted.