Installed Mavericks and now my system partition needs repair

Yeah, it doesn't.

I went to a Genius Bar today and the Genius told me that during the last few days he had a few "Mavericks-victims" with erased data, both from internal and external harddrives. He said that there's nothing he can do as Apple hasn't released any statement about it and that no one knows how to fix that problem.

Update: Trying Disk Warrior on the probably dead MBP hd, "rebuilding directory... step 5:Loading directory data... speed reducded by disk malfunction 450, and increasing ..."

Wow, looks like the journaling double failed, so to speak.

I have a Samsung 830 128gb SSD and got this error. It occurred after a reinstall of Mavericks because of an unrelated network issue I was having.

After the reinstall my SSD was taking a good 20 seconds to display contents of any Finder window. I reset the SMC and sluggishnish and EFI error message are gone.

Pascal Lessard

Indeed, it has nothing to do with RAID or Firewire,

Pardon that you do not understand. I did not claim that other HD are not being affected.

Rather I state that "MOST (roughly 80%+ from indications) affected are RAID arrays"

as I sated in an earlier post - "I never claimed conventional were not affected"

Yes, I am far more than well aware of instances such as yours.

Your occurrence is your own, however MOST ALL affected are RAID setups.

Peace 😊

Your occurence is indeed your own, and stating in red that you were affected because you have a RAID setup won't make it a general rule any more than jumping up and down and yelling. What it means is that a RAID has 2, 3, 4 or 5 more times the risk of this problem to happen because a RAID has 2, 3, 4 or 5 more disks to begin with, so 2, 3, 4 or 5 more boot sectors than a single drive. The fact that it happened to me, on my MacBook Pro's internal unraided drive with no active Firewire connection, means that these 2 hypotheses are not the major factors explaining the problem.

As a rule, different symptoms happening all of the sudden or in a cluster of people usually originates from the same cause. Instead of sitting tight on a single hypothesis that has been shown by the mere unfolding of events to be false, let's instead apply a scientific approach to find the commonalities in our situation as a group. The sooner the cause is found, the safer our data will be.

Peace indeed.

Step 6 Overlapped files detected: 534.

CPU time is over 100hrs now. Mine is a 2010 13 MBP with 128G SSD, won't start, shows EFI partition error and DU won't fix it. Use Data Rescue to get some of my data back, and continue to use Disk Warrior trying to fix it.

Google a bit (well not a bit, almost all threads having the keyword "disk warrior runtime/step5/step6"), says Disk Warrior mostly take 1-4 days or something. all other guys are saying just "let it run", but I only see one guy who run 50hrs and get his data back. Worst case: 6 weeks and failed. See here

I really don't know what DW is doing with such huge quantities of computation power.. Better note it down here so later comers may have some ideas on what is going on. Will notify about my results later.

Anyone who have used DW before and would like to share his/her experience is well appreciated!

Hi

I lost my 2 hard WD and looks like with Disk Drill Pro might save some files

it's been running since days, it's 4 Tetra disks

I'm using a MacPro4,1 with 2.93GHz Quad-core Xeon processor and 16GB of RAM. My system disk is an internal Western Digital VelociRaptor drive (WD3000HLFS). I also have an internal WD30EZRX drive, used for Timemachine, and four WD1002FBYS drives contected to an internal Areca ARC1213-4i RAID card, but none of those drives seem to be having any problems. I realize these are all Western Digital drives, but I do not believe I have any of the Western Digital software on my computer.

I installed Mavericks a few days after it came out and hadn't noticed any problems. This morning, the second time I tried waking my computer from sleep it would not wake up. I had had a similar problem under 10.8.5, before the suplemental update came out, so I thought that issue may have returned. I could remotely connect to my computer over the network and browse files, but I could not start screen sharing, so ultimately I ended up doing a hard reset. After rebooting I tried running the latest Onyx, to make sure everything was OK, but it told me there was a disk error which needed to be repaired, so I booted into my recovery partition and ran Disk Utility.

When I try to repair the system disk using Disk First Aid from the recovery partition, it tells me "Problems were encountered during repair of the partition map" and "Error: Live file system repair is not supported." When I verify the drive, it returns "Error: The partition map needs to be repaired because there's a problem with the EFI system partition's file system." Note that these errors appear when repairing the drive. When I select the volume on that drive it verifies as expected and is able to be repaired.

Then I tried creating a Mavericks install disk on an external drive and booting up from that. When I do this and run Disk First Aid, it doesn't report any errors on the device, or on the partition. So the problem only appears when the drive is scanned while booted from itself. If after running Disk First Aid from the external disk I then boot up from the recovery disk again, Disk First Aid still reports a problem with the partition map.

I have tried many combinations of these steps, all to no avail. I have also tried resetting the SMC as has been suggested, but that didn't work either. Note that, as of now, I have not experienced any data loss and am still able to boot my computer normally with no imediately apparent problems. But this is still quite disconcerting and I'd like to figure out what the underlying problem is.

Third day, still no solution.

I just ordered an internal Samsung 500GB SSD drive and going to install Mountain Lion on it. Will convert my current internal WD drive into an external USB drive and try to rescue some data.

No more Mavericks and/or Western Digital.

Thank you Apple and WD. I wish I could send you the bill for the new drive.

Your account suggests that Mavericks' journaling is being corrupted. Good information. Thanks for sharing.

For the record, everyone, I did have, at some point, Western Digital software installed on my affected Mac. I had forgotten about it long ago after attempting to find documentation on how to properly uninstall the app (and failing; thanks for the great documentation, Western Digital). I eventually disabled the software from running at all...or so I thought.

Of course, other storage vendors are experiencing failures, too, so it's not yet safe to conclude that the issue is limited to users of Western Digital's software, especially since WD seems to assume the issue is limited to externally connected storage devices and aren't considering the impact on internal system volumes not managed by WD software.

I'm just here to report my progress. Luckily now I got all my files back.

Here's the story. DW4.3 ran 101 CPU hrs (5 days) and stopped, offer me with the chance to preview and replace. I clicked Preview and happily discovered that all files are in place. Then I directly click Replace. It ran for a few seconds or so, then gave me the message of "encounter an error when preview, please rescan blah blah". I click rebuild again, but after a few hours I was wondering whether I should upgrade to DW4.4 as I was using Mavericks and not sure whether this is where it goes wrong. I quited scanning.

Some users said when they get this message and they reboot instead of rebuild immediately, they suddenly get everything back. I decided to give it a shot, no luck; and worse, my computer started to show kernel panic, even it is the good external drive I chose to boot from. To make things clear, A is to-be-fixed drive and B is the good drive with DW. At this point, A is internal, B is external. I put B internal instead, B boots up fine again. I was really confused at this point, thinking that maybe B has some problem with it and tried to make a bootable DW to fix B.

Out of curiosity, I plugged in A, my to-be-fixed drive as external drive this time. Surprisingly, the file structure is there! I tried copy stuff from A to B, and inspect all copied files in B, they're good!

What I think is happening is that, when DW4.3 gave me the error message, it has already written the directory data inside A.

Here's the takeaways:

1. Better be patient with DW. For corrupted disk, it really can take a long time. So if you think the data is worth a few day's waiting, don't give up early. Just leave it there and do your own job.

2. When DW finish and you can preview, maybe try copying data at this point. I haven't tried it, but it doesn't hurt and it is DATA that is important.

3. Use File->Save function to save the report when scan is done! I haven't done so and it's really a useful resource for the tech support of DW. Do it!

4. Tried put your to-be-fixed disk as external so you can read its content. When I ran DW, I put A as internal because I thought it will be faster for disk R/W. But that means external drive B cannot read A. Try reverse them after scanning, maybe the directory structures are already out there.

5. If you have NOT yet met this problem, backup everything you get. NOW. I haven't backup the disk and it contains precious photos of past 2 years, and it's a profound lesson for me.

The past week is the worst week I ever had this year. Everyday when I come back to the computer I hope to see something different than slowly increasing number of "Overlapped files detected: XXX". That said, DiskWarrior saves the day. I use a pirated version to fix my problem, but now I bought the software already. $99 is cheap comparing with the mental pain you'll suffer at the risk of losing all data. DW is well worth every penny.

I found little online help for usage of DW if error occurs, so I decided to share it in detail here. Late comers should consider purchasing the software. I sent them email and they replied quickly, so probably a good technical support makes it unnecessary for people to ask randomly online and wait desperately for an answer. You don't want to be the one, so back up.

Here's a quick update on my computer.

I tried to reinstall Mavericks over my existing installation from an external instal disk, but other than waste an hour, it had no effect.

This morning I saw that a new version of Onyx was released with "Bug corrected while checking the volume in some cases." That is what sent me down this rabbit hole to begin with. After upgrading, I was able to run Onyx without any errors.

So now, I find that I can scan my system disk without error when booted from anything EXCEPT Mavericks recovery disk. When I boot from the recovery disk and scan the system drive it still tells me that there are problems with the partition map. However, I am able to boot from that drive and have not noticed any other issues, so I'm chalking the whole thing up to a bug.

Hey Jeremy, I just wanted to chime in and say that I have the exact same situation as you. Disk Utility is able to verify/repair my hard drive everywhere except for when I boot in recovery disk. I get the same error messages as you. I too can boot up normally, and with the newest Onyx update, I no longer get any error messages from Onyx. Even when I boot to Mavericks recovery from a bootable USB drive, I can successfully verify/repair.

It definitely seems like a bug at this point.

Let me echo, but add to Tyler,

Same message for me. The big still-open problem I have, is that it will NOT let me re-partition the drive to add a BootCamp partition, or any other parition, which makes my computer unusable for my work, where I use this computer. (rMBP-15).

This discussion seems to have covered most of the bases, but I'll add my own experience. We're running an iMac, two MacBook Pros, and a MacBook Air. I was prompted to run disk utility on one of the MBP's after installing Mavericks because it seemed to move slowly, and because some icons were not resolving. To make a long story short, I eventually entered recovery mode, and ran disk utility from there. The ultimate messages I received were: "Problems were encountered during repair of the partition map." That was followed, in red, by "Error: Live file system repair is not supported."

I have been concerned because this smells quite bad, and I use my computers heavily for work. My main concern is that Apple see, acknowledge, and fix this problem. My situation now seems relatively stable, but I'm sitting on needles and pins just waiting for all **** to break loose, especially after reading all the preceeding posts.

By the way, thanks to all of you for sharing your experiences.