Time Machine fails to complete its first full backup

Moderators, please move this to the proper subtopic; such as Mac OS X Lion/Time Machine and delete this message. Thank you.

Thank you; now, hopefully, for some replies! 🙂

After booting from a different partition, in addition to usng Disk Utility to Repair Disk, I then used it to Repair Permissions. I have now rebotted back to Lion and hopefully this will fix the problem.

Nope: same problem.

I was able to backup the separate partitions I have created for Snow Leopard, Yosemite and El Capitan, while excluding the "Macintosh HD" partition and this was successful. As soon as I added back the Macintosh HD partition (the largest one) it failed in mid-stream.

It seems there is something on this partition that Time Machine does not like...

I downloaded the BlueDog Dashboard app that reads the Time Machine log and it seems that it fails at random files, even if I attempt to delete them before starting the backup again.

So I dual-booted over to Snow Leopard and just did a Time Machine backup of the main Macintosh HD partition and excluded the others and voilå; it works! I am not happy that I have not yet discovered the culprit, but if this workaround solves the problem; so be it!

I then rebooted back over to Lion and am attempting a full backup of all partitions...

Back in Lion: same failure!

ML?

I was not able to make the LaCie work with only one drive in the bay, so with both installed, I changed it to SAFE.

LaCie is 400 Firewire connected to a hub that connects to the 800 Firewire on the Mac Mini. So, used my 800 to 400 cable to connect directly to the LaCie and it is attempting another TM backup now at 1T instead of 2T.

How do I generate a diskutil list?

The TM Backup failed in its usual way:

Starting standard backup

Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb

Backup content size: 479.1 GB excluded items size: 1.6 GB for volume Macintosh HD

572.95 GB required (including padding), 930.51 GB available

Waiting for index to be ready (101)

SystemFlippers: didn't consume all data for vers ID 1 (pBase = 0x10d6811c0, p = 0x10d6811d4, pEnd = 0x10d6811d5)

SystemFlippers: didn't consume all data for vers ID 1 (pBase = 0x10e40ab1c, p = 0x10e40ab30, pEnd = 0x10e40ab31)

CoreEndianFlipData: error -4940 returned for rsrc type FREF (id 128, length 7, native = no)

Copied 40.1 GB of 477.5 GB, 537905 of 1693769 items

Indexing a file failed. Returned 1 for: /Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Learn to Play/.updates/Norah Jones_Thinking About You, /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb/MichaelLAX’s Mac mini/2016-03-10-201905.inProgress/5EC4328C-779F-43E3-B643-08766FB62187/Macintos h HD/Library/Application Support/GarageBand/Learn to Play/.updates/Norah Jones_Thinking About You

Aborting backup because indexing of file failed.

Stopping backup.

Copied 539710 files (40.8 GB) from volume Macintosh HD.

Copy stage failed with error:11

Backup failed with error: 11

Each time seems to be a random file; this time in GarageBand; previously in MS Office 2011...

I use Lion, not Mountain Lion. Do you think that the upgrade to ML will solve this problem?

I will try diskutil later and report back.

When you say repair the disk, what do you mean? Trash the partial updated file?

It's always something!

I reformat the LaCie many times to no avail.

This is a scary request; do I say Yes?

Here is DIsk Utility:

As denoted by The Law of Irony, my "dependable" Western Digital crashed yesterday and I cannot seem to "see" it with Disk Warrior or Data Repair or TechTools Pro! Making a backup of this 3T drive was my NEXT step! LOL! 😟 I will be researching hard drive restoration services next. Any advice?