Time Machine Current External Drive Won't Mount

[Wade Garrett]

Out of the blue, my three year old WD Elements 1 TB external USB 3.0 HD
with nine months of Time Machine backups on it won’t mount in TM and
doesn’t show in Finder. The drive light comes on initially and flashes
when accessed.

I changed out the USB cable, tried different USB slots on the computer,
even tried it with a different Mac, Windows PC and a Chromebook — all zip.

The drive itself does show in Disk Utility- with an Eject icon- though
clicking it does not do anything. Running First Aid on the drive itself
returns a Pass.

Though the TM partition on the drive is grayed out, I can select it and
have run First Aid several times. It Fails with the following messages:

Repairing file system.
Volume is already unmounted.
Performing fsck_hfs -fy -x /dev/rdisk2s2
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Detected a case-sensitive volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking multi-linked directories.
Checking volume bitmap.
The volume Backup 2017-2018 could not be verified completely.
File system check exit code is 8.
Restoring the original state found as unmounted.
File system verify or repair failed.
Operation failed…

The computer itself is fine, I bought another external HD and
successfully ran Time Machine. No current data was lost.

Even so, I would kinda’ like to have access to the incremental backups
from the last nine months if I ever needed them. But not enough to send
the drive out to an OMG expensive data recovery firm or even buy
moderately expensive data recovery software.

I guess I could just give up on it and just try an erase/reformat-
though I’m not sure I’d trust the disk any more.

[nospam]

In article <pifua3$6oa$1...@news.albasani.net>, Wade Garrett

<wa...@cooler.net> wrote:

> Out of the blue, my three year old WD Elements 1 TB external USB 3.0 HD

> with nine months of Time Machine backups on it wonąt mount in TM and
> doesnąt show in Finder. The drive light comes on initially and flashes

> when accessed.
>
> I changed out the USB cable, tried different USB slots on the computer,
> even tried it with a different Mac, Windows PC and a Chromebook ‹ all zip.
>
> The drive itself does show in Disk Utility- with an Eject icon- though
> clicking it does not do anything. Running First Aid on the drive itself
> returns a Pass.
>
> Though the TM partition on the drive is grayed out, I can select it and
> have run First Aid several times. It Fails with the following messages:

...

run disk warrior on it.

[Niels Jørgen Kruse]

Wade Garrett <wa...@cooler.net> wrote:

> Even so, I would kinda' like to have access to the incremental backups
> from the last nine months if I ever needed them. But not enough to send
> the drive out to an OMG expensive data recovery firm or even buy
> moderately expensive data recovery software.
>
> I guess I could just give up on it and just try an erase/reformat-
> though I'm not sure I'd trust the disk any more.

I see no need to discard the drive just over a corrupted filssystem.

You could connect the drive to your router (if it supports it) and use
it as an alternate Time Machine target (after wiping it).

--
Mvh./Regards, Niels Jørgen Kruse, Vanløse, Denmark

[Wade Garrett]

Thanks. I might be willing to still use it- though probably not for a
critical application like Time Machine`,,,