Boot Disk Utility
Elisabet Schwartzkopf
This is a follow on to the question I asked about replacing the hard drive in my iMac. The restore from TimeMachine finished and the machine still won't boot. Just the white screen, Apple logo and spinner. I booted to the Snow Leopard DVD and ran Disk Utility on it again -- and again Disk Utility told me:
Verify and Repair volume "Main"
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Invalid node structure
The volume Main could not be verified completely.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
Is this drive dead? Seems odd I could restore to it if it's dead. Should I try an older backup from TimeMachine? Could the most recent backup be restoring something so corrupt to the disk that it's un-bootable after the restore?
Verify and Repair volume "Main"
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Invalid sibling link
Rebuilding catalog B-tree.
Invalid key length
The volume Main could not be verified completely.
Volume repair complete.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
Error: Disk Utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.
It was a problem with the iMac's internal hard drive. Scanning the drive after the fact revealed a whole host of bad sector errors. Not sure why I couldn't pick this stuff up when I was trying to restore to it.
In any case, even with a new drive installed in the machine I couldn't get the Utilities -> Restore method of restoring the machine from my TimeMachine drive to work. It did the same thing with a new drive: it's just hang forever on boot, no chime, just Apple logo and a spinner for hours and hours.
The solution was to do a clean OS X install from the OS X DVD (instead of using the Utilities -> Restore menu option to restore the machine). Then, on first boot, when you first log in to OS X it'll ask you if you want to restore this machine from a TimeMachine drive. I said "Yes" to this option, it found my TimeMachine drive, I selected all the available types of things to restore (System Settings, User Data, Applications and Other) and let it do its thing for a few hours.
It sounds like this is a file system issue, rather than a drive issue, and you're right to consider restoring to an older backup. Unfortunately it's going to be hit-and-miss for a while, until you find a backup that works.
Once you're able to restore to a working version, I would do as DiskUtility says and backup your files and reformat the drive/reinstall the operating system, then make a brand new Time Machine backup from that.
This took me hours of trial and error to accomplish through use of a 2015 MBP...no idea why so problematic with Mojave's restore mode in order to save a fully configured OS installation as a disk image for future restores (for say, an SSD failure or capacity upgrade), who wants to do that all over again? For me a clone is more straight forward and trustworthy than using Time Machine, and faster then a file duplication approach.
Problem: persistent errors cloning and restoring APFS bootable partition for Mac Pro 5,1 (but could also be just as applicable to MBPs running Mojave 10.14.x?). Errors looking like this:
No amount of trial and error in Mojave's restore mode worked reliably. The solution that worked for me was to use the newest version of Disk Utility (v21) within Restore mode of Monterey - so if Mojave is installed, establish a partition on a MBP with a fresh, legit install of Monterey. I could only do this on my 2015 MBP (presumably any other Monterey compatible MBP would suffice, I didn't try this on one patched to accomodate Monterey). I connected my 5,1 SSD using a USB3 external case. I only used Monterey for the purposes of cloning/eventual restoring a volume with Mojave installed, which unlike Monterey gets along fine with my 5,1).
It appears one can deliberately boot into Monterey's restore mode (as appose to Mojave's) by restarting while in Monterey, then instantly holding down cmd-r, and continue to do so well after the chime and until the darker UI appears. Perhaps there is a more elegant way to do this using terminal. Would love to know if someone has info.
BTW I tried performing all this using Disk Utility while booted into Monterey but saw similar errors. Go figure. I hope this helps folks who like to archive and precisely restore complete drive configurations the way I do, and much prefer Disk Utility over a file duplication scheme such as Carbon Copy Cloner. Good luck :)
I'm aware some like to use CCC for this, but I don't see the advantage. I prefer this method since disk images copy by sectors as appose to thousands of indiv files, so it's faster. More importantly, from what I've read, an advantage of an image restore vs file restore is one can be certain the integrity of any type of link between files and their assets remain perfectly preserved. For me, there's true power in being able to pick one file, hit restore and just like that you're ready to go (apart from moving over recently made files). I do use CCC for some folder backups - dealing with the minutia of indiv files in general is certainly a different animal.
In my own personal experience Carbon Copy Cloner has been the best way to create a bootable clone of a bootable macOS drive. I've always had problems using Disk Utility to do this and sometimes even just creating a large image file with Disk Utility will fail. The only problem with using Carbon Copy Cloner these days to make a bootable macOS clone for macOS 11.x+ is to make sure to right-click on the destination drive in CCC and select the "Legacy" option so that the destination is made bootable, otherwise CCC will just create a data drive. Plus CCC is able to clone the same drive that is booted as long as apps are closed during the process and no work is being done on the drive.
In my personal experience I have found the Disk Utility GUI app to be subpar in all ways. It is rare that I will recommend using a third party app, but there are a few third party apps that are indispensable. CCC is one of those apps (some users prefer SuperDuper instead). I personally limit the third party apps I use/install on my own devices.
This just happened yesterday. My Mac crashed. Screen went black and it didn't react to anything. I tried restarting, but it wouldn't find a disk to boot from. It did find both of the disks I have in, but neither of them were bootable. I tried fixing them with disk utility. No errors. Couldn't repair permissions from the boot disk as it's not bootable anymore.
I thought, no problem, let's just reinstall Yosemite on top of the old installation. Booted from the recovery partition and that only had Mountain Lion on it! That wouldn't install as it detected that my main disk has a newer version installed. No idea why there wasn't Yosemite or even Mavericks on the recovery partition.
Next I connected a spare disk I had with USB and installed Mountain Lion on it. Booting from that and trying to install Yosemite on my main disk gives me an error telling me I don't have enough space on the main disk for the installation. Everything is still ok in disk utility (apart from not being able to repair permissions), I can access all the files just fine, but the disk is not bootable.
Can I fix this somehow without erasing the disk completely? And also does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I guess I could erase everything and recover from Time Machine backups, but somehow I do not trust that those are ok either as my problems have been rather weird.
I did boot into the recovery partition, at least that's what I think. Held down cmd + r while booting and it went there like before. I don't know what safe mode is. Had the 4 options there: restoring from Time Machine backup, reinstalling OS X, getting help online and Disk Utility.
I tried repairing the disk. No errors, so it did nothing to help solve this. I just mentioned the permissions repair because I think that's related to it as you can't repair permissions on any other disk than a bootable one. And now that I'm running the computer from a USB drive with Mountain Lion on it, the old boot disk with Yosemite on it works fine, just isn't bootable (apparently, I don't know how to check this, but it won't boot from it at least).
If your Mac is running well, you can turn on Mac and search the Disk Utility in Spotlight. Or you can run Finder, go to the Applications, click Utilities, and you can find the Disk Utility. If your Mac cannot boot normally, you should turn off the Mac and hold the power button or the Command + R keys until you see the Recovery Mode. Then you can click the Disk Utility.
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