Disk repair shrinks file system?!?

Question

Level 1

125 points

Disk repair shrinks file system?!?

Hi,

I have a late 2012 iMac with a dying Seagate 3TB drive (no, it's not included in the recall). I managed to clone what I can from it (the clone is bootable) and I have my Time Machine backups.

After cloning it, I ran a repair from the recovery partition in Disk Utility. It reported no errors. At the end, it says "shrinking file system" which is still running. Why would a repair shrink the file system?

When I use smartctl to dump the drive's SMART data, there are 7000+ reallocated sectors and other issues. The drive's performance is painfully slow. Apple better replace it, despite Disk Utility saying it's okay.

Regards, Patrick

iMac (27-inch, Late 2012), OS X Yosemite (10.10.4)

Posted on Aug 2, 2015 2:10 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Drew Reece

Level 6

10,660 points

Aug 2, 2015 2:30 PM in response to Patrick123

Patrick123 wrote:

When I use smartctl to dump the drive's SMART data, there are 7000+ reallocated sectors and other issues. The drive's performance is painfully slow. Apple better replace it, despite Disk Utility saying it's okay.

Regards, Patrick

We are just other users, so contact Apple if you want them to replace it. If you have Apple Care cover it may still be in warranty otherwise your standard warranty has probably expired & Apple have no responsibility to replace it, so ask them nicely & they may be willing help. The genius bar will give you a free appointment if you book one. They should also tell you if it is under any replacement or repair programs… (take your serial number along).

https://www.apple.com/support/exchange_repair/

The disk appears to have a lot of damage, that is why the filesytem is shrunk, OS X cannot write to areas of the disk that are unreliable, so the space needs to change.

I'd strongly suggest you make a full backup of the disk, it may stop functioning & data recovery can be expensive. SMART is giving you a warning please act on it.

Reply