So my external 500 GB drive is giving me I/O errors. I'd like some advice, other than "throw it away".
In the past, when I had drives directly attached inside the computer, I could do a low-level format, and generally had good luck letting that solve errors. This is a USB drive. I don't know how to do a low-level format. I don't know if a simple "Flush and re-write" will solve things. I know that hard drives have spare sectors for mapping bad sectors, so I'm assuming that this is a read error somewhere. But the only thing the kernel tells me is Mar 28 11:11:29 keybounceMBP kernel[0]: disk1s2: I/O error. Mar 28 11:12:02 --- last message repeated 1 time --- Mar 28 11:12:02 keybounceMBP kernel[0]: disk1s2: I/O error. Mar 28 11:12:35 --- last message repeated 1 time --- No indication of which block ID, what kind of device status flags, etc. I have never had a unix kernel report so little information. There is no /var/log/kernel.log (10.9.5), so there's no place to look for more details. My current "best" thinking is to force random writes to the whole disk (there's a diskutil command for that), and if that works without errors, and a read of the disk (cat /dev/rdisk1) works without errors, then whatever happened is probably "transient" enough to resume use of the drive. I do have a time machine backup, so excluding the concern of files suffering bitrot on the backup drive, I'm good -- nothing is lost. This drive is USB powered, so it's nice to have with a portable laptop. Advice? Anyone? (I have no idea how to read the smart status of the drive. I'm assuming it's actually maintained in the drive, but I don't know of a tool to report the smart status of a USB-connected drive) --- Entertaining minecraft videos http://YouTube.com/keybounce _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
