FSCK for external drive?

[thequicksilver]

I'm having an issue with a partition of my external FW hard drive. I know that FSCK is something that could help it, but I'm not Unix friendly and don't know if I can do this with it.

It's connected to my iBook by Firewire, but the partition I'm having trouble with is not a system partition (ie it doesn't have OS X installed on it) so how would I go about choosing it as the drive for FSCKing?

I know in DOS I'd just go

cd\<nameofdrive>
fsck -f

But how would I do this via Unix terminology in OS X's Single User Mode?

Thanks.

 

[IJ Reilly]

I don't know if this is possible, but it's not really necessary since you can check the external drive with Disk Utility running on your boot drive, which is the same thing as fsck.

 

[thequicksilver]

Sorry - brain like a sieve - I forgot to mention that the drive won't mount, and Disk Utiility won't do anything with it. Just doesn't like it or something.

Are you sure Disk Utility and fsck are one and the same? I'd been led to believe that fsck was s significantly more powerful UNIX style disk troubleshooting app, whereas Disk Utility is much more basic.

 

[IJ Reilly]

Sorry - brain like a sieve - I forgot to mention that the drive won't mount, and Disk Utiility won't do anything with it. Just doesn't like it or something.

Are you sure Disk Utility and fsck are one and the same? I'd been led to believe that fsck was s significantly more powerful UNIX style disk troubleshooting app, whereas Disk Utility is much more basic.

Even if the drive is completely unformatted, Disk Utility should be able to find it (otherwise you could never format a blank drive!). So I'm thinking you've got a problem on your FireWire bus. Do you have any way of testing this theory?

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that Disk Utility invokes fsck. I picked up this tidbit years ago.

 

[yellow]

Technically Disk Utility's verify and repair functionality is reflected in the command line by the "diskutil" binary. Fsck is not a terribly sophisticated file system check. Diskutil is only a slightly more sophisticated disk integrity check/fix, but ultimately it's still pretty simplistic and cannot cope with serious problems. Seriosuly, if you want to fix your errant disk (if indeed that is even possible), you should be looking into something like Tech Tool Pro or Disk Warrior.

 

[thequicksilver]

Thanks for that. I didn't want to bite the bullet but I have now set Disk Warrior onto it. It has actually recognised the disk and is fixing an "overlapping files" problem. It's been going 14 hours, and hasn't shifted from 61 files in the last 12, but given that one of the files on there is a 48GB dmg with a backup of my entire iBook on, this isn't surprising.

I've read reports of Disk Warrior taking up to a week to do its magic, but if it will save all my stuff, it's been worth every second.