Error 36 on Western Digital HDD

Question

Error 36 on Western Digital HDD

Hello,
Yesterday I was trying to copy several photos and videos from the Mac App Photos to a folder on my external Hard Disk WD My Passport 1TB.
During the process, both Finder and the Photos froze. I then forced the closing of Finder (which was Not Responding) and then rebooted my Mac. However, since the reboot, I cannot access anymore the folder I was copying these files to. I get an error code -36. The folder is shown as blank/Zero bytes (which is wrong because it should have several Gigs of files) and when I try to make any change to the folder (create a file within it, zip it, move it) I get this -36 error.
I have tried to run a dot_clean command but unsuccessfully.
The Hard Disk is NTFS formatted and I use Mounty to use it on Mac. I do not have any other problem in terms of usability related to the Hard Disk, as I can read/write in all the other path in the drive.

Can someone please help me to recover my data?
Is there any workaround?
Thanks!
Leo

MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2012), macOS Mojave (10.14)

Posted on Oct 2, 2018 1:38 PM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

Grant Bennet-Alder

Level 10

133,231 points

Oct 2, 2018 10:36 PM in response to urbanstyle_87

macerror -36

Mac OS error -36 (ioErr): I/O error (bummers)

The article about dot_clean is very old, and does not apply here.

I/O error in this instance has a very specific meaning. Despite trying to re-read as many as 1,000 times (which can take up to a quarter minute per bad block) using the drive's error correction, the data could not be read without error. You have Bad Blocks on the disk.

Reply

Answer 2

Tesserax

Level 10

152,200 points

Oct 2, 2018 10:36 PM in response to urbanstyle_87

Chances are the files were corrupted when you force closed Finder. If you have another computer handy, you can try seeing if it can read this drive. Although a Mac can read files on an NTFS-formatted drive, it can't write to them natively. I'm assuming that you are using Mounty for this purpose. If the drive can't be read by another computer, then these files may not be recoverable without additional file recovery methods.

Reply

Answer 3

Oct 2, 2018 10:39 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks for replying to me Grant.

Under a Windows environment, I used a Power Shell to run chkdsk D:/f and the tool fixed many bad names and truncated files in the file system.

As soon as it finished, I had my HDD working again!

Thank you for your help!

Reply

Error 36 on Western Digital HDD

Similar questions