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I have a big problem - I think. The problem seems to be that my HDD is Read-Only so I can't boot and can not erase the HDD to reinstall the system.

But here is the whole story:

I bought a used MacBook Pro 13" from Mid 2009. It was used by a friend and he used it until yesterday without any problems. I bought it and he erased the system and then I configurated the system for my preferences. I booted and everything worked fine. But then this happened:

  1. I changed the System-Language in System Preferences -> Language to German and then restarted.
  2. When restarting the Apple Logo appears and a loading Bar is bottom of this. The Bar took about 3 minutes to load - and then the MacBook shut down. That's it. I tried it about 5 times - everytime the same.
  3. I googled and used CMD + V at the start to see what's happening and I saw that the problem is that the system tries to repair the "volume" - my HDD. After the third repeat the system shuts down.
  4. So I tried the following steps to solve this:

  5. CMD + R when restarting to go to DiskUtil. In this I tried to scan the HDD. It returns that it should be repaired. I clicked repair and I got the message that DiskUtils can not repair the HDD. Then I clicked on the HDD and saw that it doesnt seems to be mounted... I tried to mounted but: "Can not mount this - try to repair and try again..." - but this still doenst work. So I was going on ...

  6. CMD + S to get into the console before starting the system. There I tried this: diskutil list. This returned: "Killed 9". Not more and not less. So I googled it:

  7. I found this page: [http://superuser.com/questions/698310/getting-the-diskutil-command-to-work-in-osx-mavericks-single-user-mode` So I tried the accepted comment...]

  8. and typed this into the console: /usr/libexec/repair_packages --repair --standard-pkgs This command returned this:

    Group differs on "Library/Java", should be 0, group is 80.

    Permissions differ on "Library/Java", should be drwxr-xr-x, they are drwxrwxr-x.

    Unable to set owner & group on "Library/Java", Error 30: Read-Only file system

    Unable to set Permissions on "Library/Java". Error 30: Read-only file system

Okay - that's it. This is all information I have and I realy dont know how to solve this ... any idea ? :/

Information: The OS seems to be OSX.

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    Have you tried going into Single-User mode (CMD + S) and running fsck -fy in order to run a check on the hard-disk to make sure that it indeed is not dying on you? Most of the time you see a loading bar at boot, this means the hard-disk is failing Oct 28, 2014 at 13:38
  • Yes fsck -fy I also tried and its the same like CMD + V. Its trieing to repeair 3 times and after 3 times the script stops and I can type again another command. It tells me "Incorrect number of thread records (4, 288)
    – TJR
    Oct 28, 2014 at 14:02

1 Answer 1

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I've encounter this problem way too many times. Usually it means that the hard drive is logically too messed up to be repaired. I usually hook it up to a Mac, dump the home directory, and then reformat the hard drive and copy the home directory back. A few times, it's actually been a true hardware failure, but usually, it's just logical.

I've had some corruption so bad that Mac OS X itself can't recover anything off the hard drive, and in that case, I use a Linux Distribution (in my case, OpenSUSE) to yank the data. OpenSUSE can write to HFS+ partitions as long as you disable journaling on them before hand.

I usually use this command, in the case of both Mac and Linux, to copy data off. As long as you are copying to a POSIX filesystem, it'll keep the permissions.

$ sudo rsync -av --progress /run/media/linux/Macintosh\ HD/USERNAME /run/media/linux/EXTERNALHD/USERNAME

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  • At home I have a Home PC with Linux (Ubuntu) on it. So it is possible to clean up the hDD with Linux ( I know how to) and then to reuse it for my Mac ? Or when doing this the error will occure again and again and again ... so its better to buy a new HDD ?
    – TJR
    Oct 28, 2014 at 14:06
  • What I would do, is load up Linux via a Live CD and run an extended SMART test on the hard drive. I find that much more reliable than relying on Mac OS X itself. As long as the hard drive is formatted for HFS+, you should be fine. Oct 30, 2014 at 17:01

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