Hi,
You should make a good backup of anything on that drive in your Mac Pro.
For normal files, a backup via TM is fine.
For virtual machines TM is not reliable.
Copy other VMs by hand or use the utility Vimalin that I wrote and for which you can find a link in my signature.
Yes I know that error -36 is an error specific about files of which the file name start with "._"
It is only Finder that makes such files and you should not get an error on a disk slice as those files do not start with a dot underscore in their name.
So something worse is going on and IMO the disk your VM lives on is no longer to be trusted.
What happens if you try to copy the slice itself to an external disk? With the VM shut down of course.. do you get an error then?
Even if you cannot copy the whole VM to an external disk, try to copy as much files in the VM as possible.
There is a chance the VM can be repaired via some of the data recovery wizards (Andre or Ulli) that are also here at these forums.
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Wil
Hi,
I'm not sure why you end up getting error -36 as it appears to be giving the wrong signal when combined with what you are seeing.
re. "running more slowly" is one of the more common signs of failure when we're talking about SSD drives. If a drive has bad cells it will map them as bad and try to relocate the requested cells to new ones. When a disk is starting to go bad, it slows down because the remapping takes time. More blocks to remap the slower it gets.
Unfortunately Disk Repair is not always a reliable diagnose tool for this. The disk itself takes care of the remapping process, so Disk Repair does not get to see that part.
See for some details here:
5 Warning Signs That Your SSD Is About to Break Down & Fail
(ironically one of the screenshots in that article also has error -36)
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Wil
Hi,
Do you know of any utilities which might be able to recover the file which is giving the error? At the very least, I would like to get as much of that file back as possible, even if I lose a few corrupted bits. As it stands, I can't copy that file elsewhere, and I don't know which parts of my Windows system are in there.
Data recovery specialists love a tool called dd, which is a command line tool and it takes blocks as parameters, not sure if it will help you much in this case.
I tried copying everything except this one slice to another drive, then adjusting the .vmdk file to remove the problem slice from the set. When I tried booting into the resulting VM, I got an error saying no operating system was found. So the slice with the problem seems to be a fairly important one.
Eeks, don't adjust the .vmdk to take a missing slice into account. That won't work, it might even have messed up your copy (although probably not).
The way a missing slice case is usually solved is by copying in an empty slice on the spot of the missing slice. If you don't have an empty slice, then create a new VM with a disk that is exactly the same size as your VM with the problem.
edit: Obviously that VM will still be damaged and the correct action to take after that is to copy the data out that you need and create a new VM.
By the way, many of my slices are more than the 2GB maximum size which all of the documentation seems to say they should be. Several of them are over 30GB, including the one with the problem.
The doc you read is out of date. In order to take the bigger disk size of today into account, the disk slice logic was changed, so that you don't end up with a huge amount of slices (which has its own challenges)
The split disk scheme since Fusion 7 is:
Capacity Extent size
================================
<=128GB 4GB (increased from 2GB)
>128GB && <2TB Capacity / 32 (so maximum of 32 extents)
>=2TB 2TB
IOW, your virtual disk is probably around 1TB in size and only has 32 slices.
With the old scheme that would have been 512 slices.
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Wil