fsck_apfs check error

So, if you have one drive in your mac and it happens to be a SSD - you are basically saying that APFS recovery is useless, then what is it there for?

You have a recovery option saying you that you can't use the recovery option and this makes sense to you?

I think my sense of sane computing is different then yours. That being said, this is not the "solution" I am looking for

since (as it did by booting from a USB stick - which is the very same thing pulled from the internet) I got the same error message again.

OK, but how do I repair a Filesystem then? Diskutility does nothing else as wraps around fsck, and fsck is not working - so what do I do now?

What is Apple doing if their FS's fails? Format the Volume? For real? APFS is not only dangerous in use,

it's absolutely insane to roll out a "upgrade" without bullet-proof repair tools for it.

How are the users suppose to actually work with this? I mean imagine any Unix out there doing the same- am I missing something, but those are basic scenarios like sudden power off, service interaption, forced restarts, system stops - not some fancy marginal scenarios but casual scenarios.

This can't be real - no working fsck, call support, pray to the internet god...

Apple, please release the sources of APFs, so other smart people can make repair tools that actually work. I still can't believe that it is the case.

Software level errors on Filesystem = Volume reformat. What is this? 1993?

Update: after starting through the only one available Recovery from the very same disk drive

where on the whole drive there is 1 APFS Container with 4 default volumes setup (erased, fresh GPT based default APFS)

I got this hillarious message - I was buffled and had to re-read this few times:

Repairing file system.

Volume was successfully unmounted.

Can’t repair volume because other APFS Volumes in its Container are mounted.

Unmount them, or perform a repair while running from another macOS system (such as the Recovery System).

Restoring the original state found as mounted.

Unable to unmount volume for repair.

Operation failed…

You gotta be kidding, right? What "another macOS system" is being referred here? I have only

one macOS system - and that is a fresh 1 SSD hard-drive High Sierra installation, AND this is

actually the very Recovery System that is supposed to repair the very same disk.

I can go and reformat my drive because that the base Filesystem (marketed as the key feature) fs can't be repaired?

Apple, for real? I'm seriously amazed at the quality and implementation of such major change as APFS.

So any one got a usefull solution on how to repair a FS that can't be repaired with it's own repair tools?

Dear reader. Understand my irritation and frustration- I am sorry for the sarcasm, it's not directed at you- I had to let it out, somehow.

otherwise I would have imploded while writing the 3rd sentence of this post.

Update II: After making a new USB bootable High Sierra installer (otherwise Recovery can't repair APFS Containers it is a part of, yup, for real) I found that -d flag (of course, documented in places I haven't been able to find) works with this version as it does in all previous versions (-d as for debug) and got a bit more output from it: In bold I marked new parts from the fsck_apfs command output (as usual very useful and informative without doc's...)

bash-3.2# fsck_apfs -d -l /dev/disk5

fletcher64_init:58: Selecting AVX2 implementation of fletcher64

** Checking volume.

** Checking the container superblock.

** Checking the EFI jumpstart record.

** Checking the space manager.

** Checking the object map.

** Checking the APFS volume superblock.

warning: apfs_sb at apfs_fs_index (0): apfs_features has unrecognized features (2)

** Checking the object map.

** Checking the fsroot tree.

error: btn: key (2) compare error: 22

fsroot tree is invalid.

** The volume /dev/disk5 could not be verified completely.

Sidenote: who is fletcher anyways? Please, tell me there is some sanity in APFS and one can actually repair

the FS without erasing the whole thing, and what then if I run into the very same error again?

How is Apple handling this internally I wonder, can't imagine Tim Cook reinstalling his macOS after this 😉

What for? I want to repair a core filesystem, not reinstall a operating system. Operating system still operates (to a degree) - what is not operating is the underlying filesystem the same operating system resides on.

Reinstalling won't solve anything since the probability is quite high that I will land in the same place again after few days of usage as I did now. Since computers do crash from time to time- or one pulls the plug on a running one unintentionally or (insert some other sane reason here)- ergo: service interruption happens, and one could assume that a new filesystem would be bullet-proof against such casual scenarios, right? Now I am not so sure about it.

I mean, imagine you have to reinstall your operating system each time your kid pulls your power cord

while running around you– since after reboot you find out that you have a filesystem called APFS that can't be

casually repaired (like filesystems do) from tools provided by its developer.

Does this makes sense to you?

Please don't take it personally - I'm just frustrated and sarcasm helps me to let out some steam otherwise computer hardware would have a very sad and short livespan because I seriously struggle to keep with my anger management in check.

I don't have disk errors, and I am absolutely sure about it. The SSD drive is fault free. I made sure about that with by booting a linux, runing hdparm, smart tests and re-checking logs for any kind of hardware faults.

It's not a hardware issue- and macOS kernel would spill something in dmesg if there is any kind of hardware issues.

I work with BSD/Unix'es for more then 20 years so I know a bit about it, and macOS is BSDish os with a fancy GUI 😉

John, thank you for your answer, I thought that Darwin + fancy GUI = macOS applies since it was synced with FreeBSD in 2000's, did something changed? Anyways, what I would like to know is how to repair my APFS filesystem.

Hardware: iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), 256GB stock SSD, nothing special, nothing fancy. Standard issue hardware and I am certain that this hardware is flawless.

What I expect is APFS to be repairable without reformatting a Container/Volume within terminal based tools, you don't?

Thank you for your answer- but most of the things you write are not correect. Apple Boot Partition was a previous disk partition scheme, nowadays modern drives uses GPT partition scheme and boot through uEFI (as all intel mac's do),

There is no pure internet boot either- since the download has to go somewhere BEFORE it is mounted, since it is a base system image that is being mounted, where do you think it goes? RAM?