Disk Utility First aid won't work on 2nd drive holding home folder

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Level 1

84 points

Disk Utility First aid won't work on 2nd drive holding home folder

My iMac running OS X 10.11.1 has an SSD as boot drive and a secondary HD where my Home folder is located. (Configuration, done in earlier OS X, is as described, e.g., in http://computers.tutsplus.com/tutorials/relocate-the-home-folder-to-another-driv e-or-volume--mac-48822 .)

Under El Capitan, Disk Utility's First Aid will no longer check that secondary drive. The error is: "First Aid process has failed...." with Details:

Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

Unable to unmount volume for repair.

Operation failed.

The same operation worked just fine with Disk Utility in Yosemite, Mavericks, Mountain Lion, and Lion. So this seems to be a bug.

(Yes, I can log in on a different account whose Home folder is on the boot SSD and run Disk Utility First Aid from there on the secondary drive just fine. But that's a real time-wasting annoyance.)

iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.1), 3.4GHz Corei7, 16GB, SSD + 2T HD

Posted on Nov 2, 2015 8:07 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 14, 2015 3:21 AM in response to murrayE

murrayE I have the exact same problem on my newly purchased MBPro 2015 Retina. My SSD is split into two partitions; HD and Storage HD. My Storage HD partition has the HOME FOLDERS symbolically linked and everything works really well except that First Aid gives frequent troubles (It´s not clear whether the drive itself suffers any actual problems). I have moved a great deal of files back and forth and created new, tried and tested files due to my research project. Sometimes I get lighter file operation errors which "seems" to be fixed by running First Aid. However, it usually fails a few times on Storage HD and I dont have a clue why or what changed when it works again. It is not critical as everything else seems to be working. I restart the laptop quite often during these tasks. It is getting very tedious and I cant figure out where to start troubleshooting.

Note: Backup is done and any file errors have been during heavy file transfer with heavy workload etc. I cant vouch for that this problem is directly related to this or something else.

Note 2: Sometimes it seems to work when I manually empty the trash as my desktop and most files are sourced from Storage HD.

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Answer 2

db24401

Level 4

1,564 points

Dec 14, 2015 6:33 AM in response to murrayE

If I UNMOUNT my external drive, then First Aid works.

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Answer 3

murrayE Author

Level 1

84 points

Dec 14, 2015 8:16 AM in response to db24401

db24401 wrote:

If I UNMOUNT my external drive, then First Aid works.

Unmounting my 2nd drive (which is internal) doesn't per se accomplish anything, since my actual user home folder is located on it (and linked into the startup drive's Users folder).

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Answer 4

murrayE Author

Level 1

84 points

Dec 14, 2015 8:38 AM in response to murrayE

My problem is "solved": my iMac with the SSD + HD internal drives died. Its replacement has just a Fusion Drive. No issue with running Disk First Aid on that.

Clearly there was a bug in the version of Disk First Aid that shipped with El Capitan: it simply did not know that one could have a second (internal) drive on which one's user folder was located and so treated that 2nd internal drive just like an external drive, which it insisted on needing unmounting before it could proceed.

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Answer 5

JDfunky

Level 2

229 points

Feb 10, 2016 6:33 PM in response to murrayE

Good for you murrayE, but the people like me who still have the separate internal HD are stuck with this issue for now. I can't see this being resolved in the future since we are a minority!

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Answer 6

ddease2

Level 1

4 points

May 21, 2016 9:21 AM in response to JDfunky

Agreed JDFunky:

There MUST be something in EC that is unlike the previous versions of OSX.

I have a 15" 2011 MBP with a 500g SSD internal. I added another 500g SSD in replace of my Superdrive. Cannot clear the ACL's on the secondary drive, cannot format it, cannot chmod/chngfl/chown it into submission.

If I take this 2nd drive out and attach it as an external drive, it works fine. I do all the aforementioned tasks to it with no problem. Put it back in as an internals and it acts like .... a SuperDrive! Wait a minute, could it be how the hardware sees that secondary device?

Any other suggestions/recommendations?

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