Erasing/formatting Time Capsule won't finish erasing

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Level 1

9 points

Erasing/formatting Time Capsule won't finish erasing

Last night I decided to erase my entire TC and start over fresh (for a number of reasons).

I went into Airport utilities, selected my TC drive and clicked the erase tab, with the option to overwrite with one layer of zeroes.

The task was supposed to take about 8hrs (approx. 600GB of old backups on there). During this time I checked it a few times before I went to bed and the process seemed to go well, with the clock counting down.

This morning I found that it is still blinking with the orange light and when I click on my TC it looks like it hasn’t finished erasing all content.

Any idea of what I should do?

I haven’t clicked the ’Cancel deletion’ yet (in Swedish on my OS) since I don’t want the process to be cancelled. Do I really have to start over again or what?

In the TM settings it doesn't look like the space has been made available yet so I'm guessing that the erasing process hasn't been completed...?

Posted on Feb 16, 2014 2:33 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 16, 2014 2:42 AM in response to Chr1st0f3r

When you format a drive the actual low level format writes zeros to every sector of the drive.. it doesn't matter how much files or space you had. It can take a long time to finish.

But if you are tired of waiting cancel and do a quick erase.. that will fix up the disk and make it available for use.

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Answer 2

Chr1st0f3r Author

Level 1

9 points

Feb 16, 2014 4:45 AM in response to LaPastenague

The thing is that when I went to bed last night it had only about an hour left before it was finished, but when I checked this morning it looked like it still wasn't finished and the count down clock was gone, that's why I thought something was not right.

Right now it's been like this for 5hrs and it doesn't seem to change. So if I follow your suggestion and do a quick erase I just hope that I won't run into trouble with any corrupt sectors causing broken backups or anything like that.

By the way, will a quick erase make the previously occupied 600GB available again?

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Answer 3

Feb 16, 2014 12:53 PM in response to Chr1st0f3r

Unfortunately time left is often out by a long way in some of these estimates.. unless the info was clear.. that it had done 90% of the format and had 10% to go,, and that 10% took twice as long as the previous 90%, then you can be very sure there are bad sectors. Most drives though will fail SMART. Once the number of bad sectors climbs to unreasonable numbers the TC will give a disk failure error.

Sometimes silly things slow it down.. like using wireless from the computer instead of ethernet and the fact the computer went to sleep.

A quick erase deletes the file table.. all sectors of the drive are made available.

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Answer 4

Chr1st0f3r Author

Level 1

9 points

Feb 17, 2014 12:36 AM in response to LaPastenague

Ok, so this is what happened yesterday:

I decided to cancel the erase since it seemed to be stuck. I pressed the 'cancel erase' button but nothing happened, so I had to break the power to my TC and start it up again.

Then I tried to do another erase with zeroes (since I wasn't sure that the quick erase would make all my space available again). The process took a little over 8hrs. Late last night when it was finally done I got the message that an error had occurred (can’t remember exactly what it said).

When I checked my TC device in Airport utilities I had two messages:

1) The internal drive needs repair

2) The Airport base station is busy

I believe that the cause of all this is the fact that the first time I tried to erase my TC drive I had the ‘Energy saver’ configured in a way that wasn’t optimal for the task I was trying to perform. It was set to ‘set the hard drive in sleep mode when possible’, ‘wake up for network access’ as well as ‘Computer in sleep mode after 15 min’.

Anyway, the second time around I had disabled/altered all these settings, but I guess the damage had already been done.

My question now is what to do to repair the drive?

I’ve searched this forum and also googled it, but the only solution I've found so far is to do a ‘hard reset’ to see if that will do the trick. If that doesn’t work I have no idea what to do next.

I thought I might be able to repair it through Disk Utilities, but the TC drive doesn’t show up as a choice there, only my startup drive is available.

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Answer 5

Feb 17, 2014 1:03 AM in response to Chr1st0f3r

Simply try a quick erase.

There are no tools to fix the disk.. disk utility will not work on a network drive.

And the Time Capsule is near useless in terms of fixing disk errors.

I recommend though you leave the TC off over night.. and start it up again tomorrow. .. do a factory reset.. a quick erase and see where you are.

Is this a gen4 TC? Do you still have applecare or any warranty on it?? Applecare on a computer or an Apple TV might cover it.

Otherwise pull the disk out of the TC and format it on a computer yourself. You will need a usb to sata disk holder.. readily available in any big computer store for a few dollars.

If the disk is no good you will quickly know it. Replace it with another drive.

If it is a Gen3 or even occasionally Gen2 had large drive.. tell me as they early ones can have power supply issues.

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Answer 6

Chr1st0f3r Author

Level 1

9 points

Feb 17, 2014 10:50 PM in response to LaPastenague

I did a hard reset and started a quick erase.

I guess my TC had already been erased earlier though the final process hadn't been completed properly (probably due to my power saving settings) because the quick erase only took about 10 sec before it was done and the TC was okay again with a green light.

I performed my first new complete backup of 150GB during the night and this morning it was finished.

I looked through all folders of the backup to see that everything was there and it seemed to be complete.

Thanks for your help!

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