6 ms·

Disk Utility still can't check and repair APFS volumes and containers (2021)

111 points by rahimnathwani 1y ago

rahimnathwani 1y ago
I needed to resize my APFS partition to install Asahi Linux. The Asahi installer couldn't resize the partition due to some orphan inodes or something. Rebooting into Recovery mode and using Disk Utility (GUI) and diskutil (CLI) didn't fix the issues. But `fsck_apfs -y` did the trick. I had to first do `diskutil unlock volume -nomount` as it was an encrypted volume.
- jokowueu 1y ago
  Where were you two weeks ago! Gonna try it
  - Igrom 1y ago
    Rather, where were they three years ago?
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  Is fsck* on the floss side?
  - bri3d 1y ago
    No. fsck_apfs is an Apple tool.
SonOfKyuss 1y ago
This article is from 2021. I’m curious if the problem has been addressed since then
- rahimnathwani 1y ago
  I faced the problem today on Tahoe. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322650
dostick 1y ago
Why post this with invalid title? It should be in 2021 it was impossible…
- rahimnathwani 1y ago
  It's still impossible. See my other comment: (EDIT: corrected link to comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322650
  - lapcat 1y ago
    By HN convention, the submission title should still have (2021) appended.
    - rahimnathwani 1y ago
      The year is useful in the title when the article provides out of date information. This isn't the case here and adding a ' (2021)' would have made the title less informative because people would assume the problem would have been fixed by now. There was no good reason to add the year.
      - lapcat 1y ago
        > The year is useful in the title when the article provides out of date information. No, that's not the reason for the HN convention. Why would someone even submit an article with out of date information? The reason for the convention is that "news" is generally expected to be new, so when it's not new, HN readers want to be informed of that fact, and they can react to the submission accordingly. It's a simple courtesy to readers.
        jxf 1y ago
        > Why would someone even submit an article with out of date information? The incredulous tone of this hypothetical worries me, because I think this actually happens with troubling regularity.
anacrolix 1y ago
I've reported a trivially reproducible mmap issue that causes Darwin to spiral into locking up with no apparent reason. "Not a vulnerability". I also reported a bug in Safari HTTP proxy handling that prevents encryption. No reply. I provided source code, and reproduction steps for both. Fuck Apple
- dillutedfixer 1y ago
  A few years back I found a bug that would make deleted photos show up in the Photos app on iPhone simply by putting transparent PNGs into the photo library. I reported it to Apple via web, no response. I called their support and talked to a very nice guy who had an in-depth conversation with me about it and even watched a video I made showing the bug. He said he was taking the issue "up the chain." About 6 months and two .x.x releases later and the bug still existed. I reported it again, no response. So I emailed AppleInsider who did a short article about it and within two weeks another .x.x release came out and the bug was fixed. Sadly I think this is one of the only ways to get big tech companies to take action these days. Cant tell you how many times I have read about Comcast, Verizon, etc screwing someone over and being unreasonable about it until theres an article on ArsTechnica or some similar site about it.
  - kevincox 1y ago
    These companies don't care about having reliable products, they care about the average consumer having the perception that their products are reliable.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  This is the reason security researchers started demanding deadlines before publishing their findings publicly. Forcing them to do damage control by publishing their dirty laundry turned out to be the best way to motivate companies to listen to reports.
user3939382 1y ago
Apple basically stopped working on non-BS macos features 10-15 years ago. The FDE unlock on boot ssh was literally shocking for this reason. Apple’s software priority is iOS DAU.
amelius 1y ago
When using Apple hardware, don't expect things to work if they're not relevant to 95% of their customers.
- hazn 1y ago
  compared to the majority of consumer laptops, doesn’t apple have an exceptional track record on this topic? their software-hardware design philosophy is unmatched in the consumer space i would say. the fact that the transition from intel chips to arm chips went as smooth as it did is a testament to my point. of course, they are not perfect.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    As long as you are on the happy path. If you diverge, wheels fall off.
thedanbob 1y ago
File systems seem to be a particular weakness of Apple. HFS+ is pretty terrible. APFS is better, until something goes wrong and then it's just as terrible. Add "network" and the situation is 10x worse. I recently gave up on Time Machine (via Samba) entirely because it would regularly corrupt itself and destroy all my existing backups.
- daymanstep 1y ago
  Hard agree. Apple has lost my data on multiple occasions. I resized my Time Machine partition and that silently corrupted most of my backups. Apple is the only company that makes such terrible file systems. I have resized partitions on NTFS and EXT3 and never lost any data. Apple is uniquely terrible in terms of file systems and data integrity in general.
  - dsego 1y ago
    I started using carbon copy cloner after the first time time machine corrupted the backup drive.
- jval43 1y ago
  Something is deeply broken with Samba in macOS, all Samba versions and all macOS versions. It just never works. And just when you think it's finally reliable and has worked for a while, it breaks in new unexpected ways. Sometimes hanging the whole machine. This was with both macOS as a server and a Linux server (less issues with Linux, but still broken). Samba isn't great on other OSs either, but not as broken as on macOS. At this point I've given up on Samba completely, and consider it something I won't use again.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - polygloty 1y ago
    Hmm interesting. Can you expand more. I've been using samba continuously on Mac for a few years now. It's been good for me so far. There is the need to reconnect every once in a while due to sleep and wake but other than that it's been consistently good
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
msie 1y ago
Sad how a large company such as Apple cant be bothered to fix many reported bugs.
- j45 1y ago
  The windows approach seems most sustainable: best to use the OS for the core OS and add third party utils for the rest to maintain functionality, including running a few small vms to keep everything packaged up and running.
CharlesW 1y ago
> The disk which I have such problems with is a little unusual in that it’s partitioned into two: a small HFS+ volume, and a much larger APFS container. So is this the actual bug then? Because I just used Disk Utility (in Tahoe) to check and repair an AFPS volume and it appeared to do the right thing, with the caveat that I had to "eject" it manually since Disk Utility complained that stuff was using it. Presumably, booting into macOS Recovery would've worked, too. If the author's reading, is there a way we can help amplify any existing bug report(s)?
tlo 1y ago
Reminds me of https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/311843/26185 https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/311843/26185 tl;dr: - Missing disk space can be related to a broken filesystem - APFS tooling is currently really bad, you probably need to erase the volume and reinstall to fix any filesystem problem ... and this was in 2018 and I fear not much changed.

111 points by rahimnathwani 1y ago

I needed to resize my APFS partition to install Asahi Linux. The Asahi installer couldn't resize the partition due to some orphan inodes or something. Rebooting into Recovery mode and using Disk Utility (GUI) and diskutil (CLI) didn't fix the issues. But `fsck_apfs -y` did the trick. I had to first do `diskutil unlock volume -nomount` as it was an encrypted volume.

jokowueu 1y ago
Where were you two weeks ago! Gonna try it
- Igrom 1y ago
  Rather, where were they three years ago?
mixmastamyk 1y ago
Is fsck* on the floss side?
- bri3d 1y ago
  No. fsck_apfs is an Apple tool.

SonOfKyuss 1y ago

This article is from 2021. I’m curious if the problem has been addressed since then

rahimnathwani 1y ago
I faced the problem today on Tahoe. See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322650

dostick 1y ago

Why post this with invalid title? It should be in 2021 it was impossible…

rahimnathwani 1y ago
It's still impossible. See my other comment: (EDIT: corrected link to comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45322650
- lapcat 1y ago
  By HN convention, the submission title should still have (2021) appended.
  - rahimnathwani 1y ago
    The year is useful in the title when the article provides out of date information. This isn't the case here and adding a ' (2021)' would have made the title less informative because people would assume the problem would have been fixed by now. There was no good reason to add the year.
    - lapcat 1y ago
      > The year is useful in the title when the article provides out of date information. No, that's not the reason for the HN convention. Why would someone even submit an article with out of date information? The reason for the convention is that "news" is generally expected to be new, so when it's not new, HN readers want to be informed of that fact, and they can react to the submission accordingly. It's a simple courtesy to readers.
      - jxf 1y ago
        > Why would someone even submit an article with out of date information? The incredulous tone of this hypothetical worries me, because I think this actually happens with troubling regularity.

anacrolix 1y ago

I've reported a trivially reproducible mmap issue that causes Darwin to spiral into locking up with no apparent reason. "Not a vulnerability". I also reported a bug in Safari HTTP proxy handling that prevents encryption. No reply. I provided source code, and reproduction steps for both. Fuck Apple

dillutedfixer 1y ago
A few years back I found a bug that would make deleted photos show up in the Photos app on iPhone simply by putting transparent PNGs into the photo library. I reported it to Apple via web, no response. I called their support and talked to a very nice guy who had an in-depth conversation with me about it and even watched a video I made showing the bug. He said he was taking the issue "up the chain." About 6 months and two .x.x releases later and the bug still existed. I reported it again, no response. So I emailed AppleInsider who did a short article about it and within two weeks another .x.x release came out and the bug was fixed. Sadly I think this is one of the only ways to get big tech companies to take action these days. Cant tell you how many times I have read about Comcast, Verizon, etc screwing someone over and being unreasonable about it until theres an article on ArsTechnica or some similar site about it.
- kevincox 1y ago
  These companies don't care about having reliable products, they care about the average consumer having the perception that their products are reliable.
jeroenhd 1y ago
This is the reason security researchers started demanding deadlines before publishing their findings publicly. Forcing them to do damage control by publishing their dirty laundry turned out to be the best way to motivate companies to listen to reports.

user3939382 1y ago

Apple basically stopped working on non-BS macos features 10-15 years ago. The FDE unlock on boot ssh was literally shocking for this reason. Apple’s software priority is iOS DAU.

amelius 1y ago

When using Apple hardware, don't expect things to work if they're not relevant to 95% of their customers.

hazn 1y ago
compared to the majority of consumer laptops, doesn’t apple have an exceptional track record on this topic? their software-hardware design philosophy is unmatched in the consumer space i would say. the fact that the transition from intel chips to arm chips went as smooth as it did is a testament to my point. of course, they are not perfect.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  As long as you are on the happy path. If you diverge, wheels fall off.

thedanbob 1y ago

File systems seem to be a particular weakness of Apple. HFS+ is pretty terrible. APFS is better, until something goes wrong and then it's just as terrible. Add "network" and the situation is 10x worse. I recently gave up on Time Machine (via Samba) entirely because it would regularly corrupt itself and destroy all my existing backups.

daymanstep 1y ago
Hard agree. Apple has lost my data on multiple occasions. I resized my Time Machine partition and that silently corrupted most of my backups. Apple is the only company that makes such terrible file systems. I have resized partitions on NTFS and EXT3 and never lost any data. Apple is uniquely terrible in terms of file systems and data integrity in general.
- dsego 1y ago
  I started using carbon copy cloner after the first time time machine corrupted the backup drive.
jval43 1y ago
Something is deeply broken with Samba in macOS, all Samba versions and all macOS versions. It just never works. And just when you think it's finally reliable and has worked for a while, it breaks in new unexpected ways. Sometimes hanging the whole machine. This was with both macOS as a server and a Linux server (less issues with Linux, but still broken). Samba isn't great on other OSs either, but not as broken as on macOS. At this point I've given up on Samba completely, and consider it something I won't use again.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- polygloty 1y ago
  Hmm interesting. Can you expand more. I've been using samba continuously on Mac for a few years now. It's been good for me so far. There is the need to reconnect every once in a while due to sleep and wake but other than that it's been consistently good

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

msie 1y ago

Sad how a large company such as Apple cant be bothered to fix many reported bugs.

j45 1y ago
The windows approach seems most sustainable: best to use the OS for the core OS and add third party utils for the rest to maintain functionality, including running a few small vms to keep everything packaged up and running.

CharlesW 1y ago

> The disk which I have such problems with is a little unusual in that it’s partitioned into two: a small HFS+ volume, and a much larger APFS container. So is this the actual bug then? Because I just used Disk Utility (in Tahoe) to check and repair an AFPS volume and it appeared to do the right thing, with the caveat that I had to "eject" it manually since Disk Utility complained that stuff was using it. Presumably, booting into macOS Recovery would've worked, too. If the author's reading, is there a way we can help amplify any existing bug report(s)?

tlo 1y ago

Reminds me of https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/311843/26185 https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/311843/26185 tl;dr: - Missing disk space can be related to a broken filesystem - APFS tooling is currently really bad, you probably need to erase the volume and reinstall to fix any filesystem problem ... and this was in 2018 and I fear not much changed.