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Segmented disk image missing parts

I reformatted a RAID5 bank because I added more drives. No sweat. I created a 342GB disk image with Disk Utility but needed to break it up to fit on several external/internal drives (FAT32, NTFS, HSF+). Using hdituilI, I wound up with 156 segments at 2.2GB. (I had a 2.3GB filesize limit on one drive) Segmenting finished; I checked the image and it mounts. Great! I copied everything to the other drives. To skip ahead a bit, the new RAID works splendidly and I brought all the disk image segments back together in a folder. But...

hdiutil reports that a random selection of nearly 1/3 the disk image segments are missing.
"sudo hdiutil attach /Volumes/RAID50/Diskimages/OFFRAID.dmgPart(s) missing: 11-12, 14, 18, 21-22, 26, 28, 30-31, 33-37, 40, 42, 45, 48-49, 51-52, 54, 56-60, 65, 68, 78-81, 83-84, 86-87, 89-92, 94-97, 99-100, 102, 104-105 and 107
hdiutil: attach failed - missing segment"

Uh, nope. They are all present and there is no rhyme or reason to the problem files. I checked the file lengths and all the data seems to be there.

What in the world happened and more importantly, how do I fix this? Is there a way to force hdituil to mount the image anyway or manually identify the 'missing' segments?

Dual G5 2Ghz Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Posted on Aug 20, 2006 2:50 PM

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4 replies

Aug 21, 2006 4:19 PM in response to Mr Spork

Well, I opened the Disk Images in a Hex editor and discovered the files that are "missing" do not have XML lists before and after the data. It is so frustrating to see your data stare back at you as a useless soup of ASCII.

My best guess is that hdiutil first creates the data disk images but returns and appends some sort of directory list to each segment. I started copying when hdiutil moved on to the next image thinking the previous one was complete. Naturally, I checked the disk image by mounting it but only after the XML modifications were added.

I hate to point fingers here, but that is counter intuitive and really bit me you-know-where this time. If I am correct in this process, may I suggest adding some kind of feedback such as naming the files Backup.081.dmgpart.temp until the entire process is complete. (Then removing the .temp extension) I know I take a good dose of the blame here, but it seems like a simple fix compared to the trouble it caused.

Segmented disk image missing parts

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