Backup drive failure: "Cannot allocate memory"

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Level 1

14 points

Backup drive failure: "Cannot allocate memory"

iMac early ’09. 8GB RAM. OS 10.6.8, 8. Apps and OS auto-update, so should be current.

Backup disk 2 TB Hitachi Touro Desk Pro HTOLDNB20001BBB (USB 2.0). New Nov 2012, initialized and worked until now. Hitachi lists my Mac and OS as compatible. No firmware updates available.

I have screen shots mentioned in post, but no way to attach them here? Links follow post.

Morning message from Time Machine saying hadn’t backed up in 10 days, so investigated. No sound from Touro but on and connected. Disconnected>reconnected power and USB, then rebooted iMac. During reboot message box “..doesn’t recognize disk,” w reformat as an option.

Touro not listed as a device in Finder window and doesn’t turn up on desktop as before. But, Sys Profiler (screen shot) and Disk Utility (screen shot) do see it; First Aid doesn’t offer Verify, so can’t test. Tried to reinitialize as Mac Ext. Journaled, Zero Out Data (exctly as initialized when new). Initialize failed. Tried to initialize repartitioning to one partition, and again two partition, GUID scheme. Partition failed with error: POSIX reports: Operation could complete. Cannot allocste memory. No sound from Touro during any of this.

Rebooted from CD and ran all of the above again with identical results.

Have reviewed related threads without much success.

I’ve done no disk image restore because I don’t understand how to work with them.

Also haven’t gotten into Terminal to try anything from there.

I’ve attached 3 screen shots of some Activity Monitor info, plus the Sys Profiler and DU page. Rare as it is, I’m suspecting the Touro HD, based mostly on the fact there’s no sound of a disk in there. Never any problems using a 5 GB G-Drive x4 years until size forced a replacement backup drive.

A couple of threads here suggest upgrading to Lion/MLion, but I won’t do that without backup and really don’t want it yet, anyway. Do not use or want iCloud, either.

At the moment I’m completely without backup and uncomfortably exposed. Any assistance sincerely appreciated.

Screen shots:

file://localhost/Users/Susan/Library/Application%20Support/SnapNDrag/disk%20mem% 202:27:13.jpg

file://localhost/Users/Susan/Library/Application%20Support/SnapNDrag/sys%20mem%2 02:27:13.jpg

file://localhost/Users/Susan/Library/Application%20Support/SnapNDrag/Partition%2 0failure%202.27:13.jpg

file://localhost/Users/Susan/Library/Application%20Support/SnapNDrag/Sys%20Profi ler%20detected.jpg

Posted on Feb 27, 2013 1:42 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 27, 2013 1:58 PM in response to Susan Hull

Go to your local office supply store and buy a new disk. Disks are physical devices, which spin around at very high speed, and they don't last forever. If you live in the wilderness where office supply and/or computer stores are hundreds of miles away, order it from Amazon and pay extra for overnight delivery. Plug in the new disk and say "yes" when it asks whether you want to use it as a Time Machine disk.

For what it is, a disk is ridiculously cheap. (If you get me going I'll tell you about my first workstation, a NeXT slab, which cost $2999 and had a 105MB disk in it. Yes that's mega-byte with an 'm'. To get the full OS including developer tools, I had to buy an external disk. I spent $1000 on 500MB. Yes, that's HALF of a GB.) You should be able to get a perfectly reasonable 2 or 3 TB drive for ~$100. Your data is worth much much more than that.

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Answer 2

Susan Hull Author

Level 1

14 points

Feb 27, 2013 8:01 PM in response to cathy fasano

Thank you for your response. Having bought this new in November, I hope to receive a suggestion or two for troubleshooting toward a potential solution. If it turns out I have a fried disk, I'll deal with it, but a dismissive "Chuck it" and mine-was-worse-than-yours seems short of appropriate as a first step.

Constructive ideas respectfully requested and will be most welcome, Mac friends.

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Answer 3

Feb 27, 2013 9:37 PM in response to Susan Hull

It wasn't a dismissive chuck it -- simply pointing out that buying a new disk and making a new time machine should be Job #1. Figuring out whether the old disk is defective or just needs a few rounds of fsck can wait until you are no longer "flying without a net." If the disk does turn out to be ok, you can use it to periodically make a bootable clone of your drive. You really should have both -- a bootable clone brings you back up quickly from one kind of disaster (an upgrade that goes bad being the most probable of that type) while regular Time Machines are your best protection against a disk that goes bad.

I speak from some experience -- after a few months of occasional hangs, and a disk that would not fsck clean, my disk failed yesterday morning. Fortunately my backup was from Saturday night. A trip to the staples to buy a new disk, to the Farm King for a #6 torx wrench, digging around for a tiny screwdriver, and I had the drive in. Then I had to install 10.6.0 on it from my install disks, and restore the TM backup, and run all of the updates, and it took about 10 hours total. If I had had a bootable 10.6.8 clone it would have knocked about 6 hours off of the job...

Once you migrate to 10.7, a bootable clone is an absolute necessity. I have heard stories of people having their installs go bad, and then the booting off of the recovery partition and re-downloading the os software and loading the TM backup taking DAYS. Which means not happening if their network is too flakey to stay up for days.

But to repeat -- your most important worry right now should be making sure you have a backup. Then when you are covered, you can go about figuring out if your old disk is reliable or not. If not, then you will want to buy yet another disk to use for your clone.

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Answer 4

Susan Hull Author

Level 1

14 points

Feb 28, 2013 11:19 AM in response to cathy fasano

Thanks, Cathy, esp for your concern about data. When this happened I copied critical and recent stuff to

an older, smaller drive. It's not complete protection, but between that and a couple laptops and drives knocking around in the closet, I could probably reconstruct : ) . I've sometimes thought I should just get rid of all the relics, but then a situation comes along....

Thanks again.

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