Hi Peter, In the past, I have had drives get "hung-up" and refuse to unmount (generally, I think, when OSX thought the drive was "in use" - but I couldn't find out what was supposed to be "using" it).
In this case, I have found that shutting down the computer seems to "put everything to bed" and the disk is OK when the computer reboots. I realise that your situation is different and I don't know if it will help in your situation - but it might be worth a try (if you haven't already tried this). Of course, this would not solve your original problem - but, if the disk could now be mounted/unmounted, you could then proceed with Ronni's suggestions to sort out your TM problems. HTH Cheers Neil -- Neil R. Houghton Albany, Western Australia Tel: +61 8 9841 6063 Email: n...@possumology.com on 9/2/11 2:06 PM, Peter Bull at pb...@bbnet.com.au wrote: > > Hi Ronni, > I tried a couple of the things you suggested but kept getting a message that > the disk could not be unmounted and so the Repair Disk could not be done. > > So I decided that erasing and reformatting the disk was the only option, but > again it was not possible as it could not unmount the disk. > > Following a previous post of yours about deleting, I have not tried to delete > by dragging the backups to the Trash. > > What's next?? > > Regards, > > Peter Bull > iMac 10.6.6 > > Windows 7 (also under sufferance!) > > > On 07/02/2011, at 7:36 PM, Ronda Brown wrote: > >> >> >> On 07/02/2011, at 6:48 PM, Peter Bull wrote: >> >>> >>> I have an external hard drive for backups and I think there is a problem >>> with a backup of a USB drive. I tried to delete so I could do another backup >>> but I get an error message -50 which the Apple website translates as "-50 >>> paramErr Error in user parameter list". >>> >>> Time Machine also informs me that it can't do its hourly backup. >>> >>> Any ideas? >> >> Hi Peter, >> >> How did you try to delete the backup? You should never delete Time Machine >> backups by moving them to the Trash with Finder. >> They should only be deleted by using the Time Machine backup itself (enter >> Time Machine, select the backup, click the gear button, select "delete >> backup². >> >> Otherwise our TM backups will corrupted. If they are you would need to >> reformat your Time Machine disk with Disk Utility and start over. >> >> But first: Try to ³Repair the Backup Time Machine Drive >> <http://web.me.com/pondini/Time_Machine/A5.html> >> >> Time Machine won¹t be able to do it¹s hourly backup until you can repair the >> File System on the drive. >> >> >> Cheers, >> Ronni >> >> 17" MacBook Pro Intel Core i7 >> 2.66GHz / 8GB / 1067 MHz DDR3 / 500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 7200rpm >> >> OS X 10.6.6 Snow Leopard >> Windows 7 Ultimate (under sufferance) >> -- The WA Macintosh User Group Mailing List -- Archives - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/archives.shtml> Guidelines - <http://www.wamug.org.au/mailinglist/guidelines.shtml> Unsubscribe - <mailto:wamug-unsubscr...@wamug.org.au>
