[AlphaQuam]

Okay... earlier this evening one of my hard drives got corrupted during a system freeze and I had to reformat (neither Disk Utility or DiskWarrior could revive it). Now I'm using Disk Utility and trying to divide a 250GB drive into 3 partitions. No matter what I do, it never works 100%. I've divided it up approximately 160/60/14. Whenever I hit partition Disk Utility seems to pick at random 1 or 2 partitions that it will actually create and mount. It has yet to create all 3 successfully. The partitions that aren't created successfully show up grey as "disk0s3" or "disk0s5" etc. under the name of the drive in the left menu. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? I managed to get it to work if I partitioned them out, then erased each partition separately. But then, after restart, only one or two will mount, and I will have to erase the others again to get them to show up. Any ideas at all?

Thanks!

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by AlphaQuam:
Okay... earlier this evening one of my hard drives got corrupted during a system freeze... Any ideas at all?

Perhaps you have it backwards, you received a system freeze because your hard drive bit the big one. That would explain why you cannot partition your drive. Did you try creating one partition and formatting that to see if you receive any errors?

Mike

[AlphaQuam]

Mike... good point. Perhaps I do have it backwards. I tried creating a single partition and that worked, but when I "verified" it, it said the volume bit map needs minor repair. I don't understand how that could be the case after a reformat. Anyway, I repaired the drive, and this is what I get...

Repairing disk for “Alpha”
Mounting Disk(S,"Checking HFS Plus volume.",0)
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Checking Catalog hierarchy.
Checking volume bitmap.
Volume Bit Map needs minor repair
Checking volume information.
Repairing volume.
The volume Alpha was repaired successfully.

Repair attempted on 2 volumes
1 HFS volume repaired
1 volume could not be repaired

So... one volume could be repaired and one couldn't? I only selected one in the first place. I rechecked the disk after this and I get the same message... "volume bitmap needs to be repaired." Any ideas? Does this sound like a hardware failure? Or is Disk Utility just not up to the task?

[AlphaQuam]

Well... I'm doing a surface scan with TechTool and I've got 62 bad blocks and it's not even done with 1% of the drive. Looks like this one's going back to Maxtor. Guess I did have it backwards.

[Maflynn]

Originally posted by AlphaQuam:
Well... I'm doing a surface scan with TechTool and I've got 62 bad blocks and it's not even done with 1% of the drive. Looks like this one's going back to Maxtor. Guess I did have it backwards.

Well, at least you've solved the problem, unfortunitly its a bad HD. good luck.

Mike