"The volume Macintosh HD could not be repaired after 3 attempts."
This started happening after iMac installed the latest version of MacOS Sierra.
iMac crashed while running a YouTube video on Safari, then went into a reboot loop. Presently it doesn't boot normally (progress bar moves and very slowly finishes and then system shuts down; gets heated up too) and "fsck -fy" fails in the Single User Mode.
Please help!!
iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), MacOS Sierra
Thank you for your help so far. Assuming my hard disk is not entirely dead, should I?
Thanks again, just hoping to save the data before I replace the hard disk.
Is there no other way than replacing the hard disk, like formatting the hard disk and reinstalling OS?
Also how do I take back-up of my stuff as nothing happens when I start with "Command + R". I never see the Mac OS X Utilities screen just a blank screen.
I currently have my hard disk partitioned into Macintosh HD and Windows.
On one of the blogs someone had suggested doing -
To Debug, Repair, Force (and fix errors automatically)
/sbin/fsck_hfs -drfy /dev/disk0s2To scan for bad blocks:
/sbin/fsck_hfs -S /dev/disk0s2Is there no other way than replacing the hard disk, like formatting the hard disk and reinstalling OS?
You can certainly try that. Try those other options if you wish also, but the failure is likely to occur again, perhaps in a short period of time. Disk Utility already executed those identical commands, several times.
If you have no backups already, it's a bit late for that now.
Option 2 is easier, and identical to Option 1 as far as the MacBook Pro is concerned, so that's what I recommend. Assuming it mounts, you could then exhaust every alternative to extract its data or "repair" it using whatever method you choose — keeping in mind any "repair" should be considered temporary, and used for the sole purpose of creating a backup or extracting uncorrupted data.
Disk Utility and its 'repair disk' option actually uses the same fsck command that you appear to have run from singleuser mode.
What fsck does is attempt to repair corruption to the directory of the disk drive, sometimes the corruption is so bad fsck cannot repair it. Whilst it is possible the drive has a hardware failure like John Galt suggests it maybe merely that the corruption is too bad for fsck.
In which case you have two options. You could completely reformat the drive, obviously this will lose all files on the drive but if the format succeeds you could restore the files from a backup. You do have a backup don't you? 😉 Alternatively and I am surprised no-one else has mentioned it already there is a tool called DiskWarrior. This works in a totally different way to Disk Utility aka fsck in that DiskWarrior does not attempt to repair the existing disk directory, instead it builds a new copy from scratch. There is no guarantee that DiskWarrior will succeed but over the years it has helped a lot of people where Disk Utility could not.
That Mac's hard disk drive has failed. You can replace it yourself or pay Apple to do it: Contact Support
fsck -fy fails. please help!!
