What do you mean by "reformatted"? I'm not an expert on how disk drives work, but here's my experience, which has worked for me.
The same thing happened to me last week on a 4 year old MacBook Pro original internal drive, with the same error message. Disk Utility refused to repair the disk, as per the error message. A test using some other utility (I forget now, maybe TechTool Pro) told me "bad blocks". Using Disk Utility, I erased the disk **using the write-zeroes-once option** because that maps out bad blocks so they won't be used again. Then I restored from my most recent Time Machine backup. The MacBook Pro wouldn't boot at all after that (no error messages), but examining it from an external startup drive showed a huge number of files with obscure names (more than 11,000) in the "DamagedFiles" folder (created, I believe, by Time Machine). I assumed they were corrupted blocks somewhere in the system that had gotten backed up to Time Machine over a period of time. So I reinstalled Mountain Lion from the original Mountain Lion installer and applied the 10.8.3 combo updater. This left all my other files from the previous restore intact, including applications and data. The MacBook Pro is now back to normal and working fine for the past week or ten days. This exact same thing had happened on the same drive about a year ago, and the same fix lasted for the past year. Of course there may still be corrupted blocks in my applications and data that had been backed up to Time Machine and then restored, but so far I haven't run into any. I use a very large number of applications and files on this MacBook Pro about 14 hours every day in my law practice and in my programming career, so I'm fairly confident that I have a usable system now. If you're merely erasing the disk without writing zeroes, your bad blocks are still mapped in and still being used. And restoring from backup may be restoring corrupt blocks, too. I assume either of these issues could lead to the same failure message, but certainly reusing bad blocks could. I don't know whether there is such a thing as "flaky" blocks, but maybe you would get normal behavior for a few days following an erase and restore before the next failure of a critically located flaky block. Bill On Apr 23, 2013, at 9:52 PM, Kevin Callahan <[email protected]> wrote: > In fact, it happened 3 days ago. I reformatted, created a brand new backup. > Now tonight, once again. > > Clues as to what causes this? -- Bill Cheeseman - [email protected]
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