Either one backup drive is dead, or the cable is. My Time Machine backup for Mac mini was on it. I copied the it to a different, 1 TB smaller drive, and now it’s running fsck on the backup image. But I will need to resize the partition, because it won’t think there’s any free space if I don’t.
I assume fsck is still running, not on Mac mini right now.
So I got a shitty WD portable drive from Best Buy, Target didn’t actually have it, so I had to transfer $200 total from savings, thanks to Target’s authorization. I tried using the cable from the old Seagate drive, because it’s longer, and got some errors, one error being some “critical target error”. Which the other drive has too. The other errors might not be important.
[Sun Jan 29 14:41:05 2023] ses 13:0:0:1: Wrong diagnostic page; asked for 1 got 8 [Sun Jan 29 14:41:05 2023] ses 13:0:0:1: Failed to get diagnostic page 0x1 [Sun Jan 29 14:41:05 2023] ses 13:0:0:1: Failed to bind enclosure -19
Smart works on this drive, without doing any workarounds though. You might have to disable UAS or whatever for the Seagate drive.
smartctl 7.3 2022-02-28 r5338 [x86_64-linux-6.1.8-1-default] (SUSE RPM)
Copyright (C) 2002-22, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
Read Device Identity failed: scsi error unsupported field in scsi command
If this is a USB connected device, look at the various --device=TYPE variants
A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.
That’s what happens if I run smartctl -a on the other Seagate drive, and the possibly dying or dead one.
If I didn’t buy the brand of the first drive that died on me, I wouldn’t buy WD. Or maybe it didn’t die on me, it was just dead. Might not have been my computer, a family computer perhaps.
But all regular USB drives are crap most likely. So let’s see how long portable drives last. Well, might last a long time, since Time Machine won’t be on it anymore. Didn’t think it was a big deal only having one copy of Time Machine. I was wrong. There’s two copies now.
I need to test the other USB cable with either the portable drive, or the dead drive. If it too gets errors, then it isn’t the USB cable.
But if it works fine, USB cables apparently die. Too bad it’s copying data from that drive, in case the movies drive dies too. It’s the same model of drive I think as the dead one. Well, I’ll have two backups of the movies drive if the other drive is fine. Now where do you buy a replacement cable? Don’t even know what kind of cable it is.
Then again, I might replace the movies drive with a WD, since SMART works on WD. Not anything to do with reliability. If I wanted that, I would shell out money for NAS drives. But it might have only been $125 for a NAS drive and two bay HD dock from Best Buy, not much more. But I only need one slot in the dock. And would rather have an enclosure, but they have no 3.5" enclosures at the store. Most of the stuff on Amazon is junk.
The last Time Machine backup was from the 26th, but I didn’t notice the problem until the 28th.
And if you shrink the partition, it runs fsck again. I was going to back it up before updating it. Didn’t know there was a new macOS, not the latest latest. But one version behind the latest major version. Won’t be done till tomorrow probably. And might just fail anyways. As fsck said it was corrupt or something and it couldn’t repair it. Oh and it makes a big new partition, hopefully I can delete that partition if it shrinks it. I should have made it 1.5 TB or 2 TB though. 1 TB is kind of small, when the internal drive is around 500 GB I think. At least it won’t use all the space on the drive.
I can mount the image though. So some data must still be in it. Might have to mount and copy to new image. So maybe sometime next week I’ll have backups again on it.
Now you know why USB is unreliable, USB cables can die, but so can SATA cables. Assuming that’s the problem.