Incorrect number of file hard links

[pheon]

I have a MacBook Pro Retina, Mid 2012 running OS X 10.9 having recently upgraded.

Using Disk Utility to Verify Disk it reported the following

Checking file system
Performing live verification.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Incorrect number of file hard links
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Error: This disk needs to be repaired using the Recovery HD. Restart your computer, holding down the Command key and the R key until you see the Apple logo. When the OS X Utilities window appears, choose Disk Utility.

I followed the instructions and the Disk Utility on the Recovery HD reports that the disk is OK.

Rebooting and checking again with Disk Utility in my Admin account reports the same original error.

Is this a problem? How do I fix it?

 

[SteveXi]

I had the exact same experience this morning, but on a macbook air.

I turned off FileVault encryption, then restarted to the recovery partition, then ran the disk utility repair disk again, and now it seems to have fixed the problem.

 

[deleuze1]

same problem. OSX 10.9 MacBook Pro retina 2012. disk verify shows incorrect number of extended attributes, then tells me to repair disk w/ Recovery HD. I do that, restart, but same error shows up in live verification. Not sure what to do..

 

[chikhao]

I had the same problem, but only after my cleanapp software crashed unexpectedly. The first time it occur, I had to fix the disk twice before the error was gone. The second time, I was able to fix the error once.

I have deleted cleanapp for good.

Can anybody report back did you see this message after some of your app broke or it's under completely normal usage?

I am curious to see if it is solely caused by the software crash or something more severe.

Thanks

 

[markjholloway]

Filevault is the problem

I followed SteveXi's advice and it worked perfectly:

"I turned off FileVault encryption, then restarted to the recovery partition, then ran the disk utility repair disk again, and now it seems to have fixed the problem."

 

[powers74]

Oh crap. I'm getting

"Orphaned file inode (id = 75597773
Look for missing items in lost+found directory
The volume 640 could not be repaired
File system check exit code is 8
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required
Error: disk utility can't repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk and restore your backed-up files.

Thank god for TimeMachine.

Fingers crossed.

Update: well, the disk repair & TimeMachine restore went off without with a hitch.

 

[jeffpickard]

I had the exact same experience this morning, but on a macbook air.

I turned off FileVault encryption, then restarted to the recovery partition, then ran the disk utility repair disk again, and now it seems to have fixed the problem.

Thanks SteveXi, this worked for my MacBook running Sierra 10.12.2..too!

 

[dnslong]

I had the exact same experience this morning, but on a macbook air.

I turned off FileVault encryption, then restarted to the recovery partition, then ran the disk utility repair disk again, and now it seems to have fixed the problem.

I had the same error (plus some others) when I ran First Aid on my MacBook Pro running macOS 10.12.5. Turning off FileVault encryption and re-running the disk utility fixed the problem! I thought I had a broken SSD. Thank you for sharing your fix!

 

[sdebeaubien]

Incorrect number of file hard links

So I have a 2011 iMac, with an upgraded 1TB internal SSD, and an external FireWire 2TB drive that I use for backing up. It's an Apple clone drive, made by I don't even remember who, but it's footprint is designed to be exactly the same as a Mac-mini. Anyhow, I've had it since 2012 and it's been used for backing up, for storing excess stuff and so on. It crashed the other day, I believe due to a power out. We've had so many brown-outs I cannot even tell you, and the "Experts" say drives can no longer crash, but this thing failed after a power out - I am CERTAIN (my last backup is dated 1/12 and the power out was on 1/13 very early in the a.m.) I didn't even notice it was gone at first, I used my system for an entire week, and didn't notice there were no backups happening every hour... which is ridiculous, but that's another discussion.

I checked and the drive wasn't even mounted. I powered it off, and then back on and it mounted, but it was incredibly slow. So, I fired up Disk Utility, and chose "First Aid" for the drive. First Aid ran twice and told me it couldn't repair the drive, because it couldn't unmount it. I used the command line options to unmount the drive:

unmountDisk force /dev/disk3

Then, I ran First Aid again. It ran for about TWO DAYS, and then finally I got to that message above. It has now been running for about another 24hrs and I have the message at the bottom now:

Repairing file system.
Volume is already unmounted.
Performing fsck_hfs -fy -x /dev/rdisk3s2
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.
Checking multi-linked files.
Incorrect number of file hard links
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking multi-linked directories.
Checking volume bitmap.
Checking volume information.
Repairing volume.

I have a lot of stuff on this drive, besides the backups of my machine, so I hope it's still usable when Disk Utility / First Aid gets done. Will reply with more info.

 

[sdebeaubien]

Just a quick update. 24 hours later, and it's still running the repair. Now I have repair data, of this format:

...
Next ID in a hard link chain is incorrect (id = 92570293)
(It should be 89974190 instead of 92524028)
Previous ID in a hard link chain is incorrect (id = 89974190)
(It should be 92570293 instead of 90293737)
...

Quite a number of those. It finished that phase and went immediately back to "Recheck" the volume.

...
Rechecking volume.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Checking extents overflow file.
Checking catalog file.


It appears that it has been able to fix a number of errors on the drive. Whether or not that makes it usable remains to be seen.

 

[sdebeaubien]

24 hrs later... still rechecking the volume... I'm not holding out much hope for this drive.

 

[sdebeaubien]

Another 24 hrs later... Disk Util / First Aid is now on this phase:

...
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.

Still not holding out much hope for the future of this drive.

 

[sdebeaubien]

Another 24 hrs later... It's been over 6 days now... I fired my machine up Monday, 1/14 (after a power out), but don't think I noticed these issues until the following Monday, and then started the Disk Util / First Aid process.

It's now here on the 2nd pass:

...
Checking multi-linked files.
Checking catalog hierarchy.
Checking extended attributes file.
Checking multi-linked directories.


Anyone have any ideas why it's so darn slow? The drive is nearly 90% full, mostly backups from my main machine. My machine is old, as I said, a 2011 iMac. It only has USB 2.0 ports, so backing up via USB isn't an option. I bought a Thunderbolt 2 Express Dock last year for it so I can back it up through USB 3.0 (via Thunderbolt 1.0, but the device says it's backwards compatible with the old Thunderbolt standards)

 

[sdebeaubien]

The Disk Util / First Aid finished. Drive appears usable. It's doing a backup right now from my main internal drive now. We shall see if it works. If I don't reply further, then the drive is OK.

 

[sdebeaubien]

One final report. Drive appears usable. After the repair finished, I went back and first thing I did was run a backup. My machine backed up a couple GB's to the drive, and aside from it being slow (took forever to calculate what needed backing up), it went OK. Then, I went and tried accessing some of the files I had recently put on that drive. They were hosed. Some had very weird file sizes. I simply tried copying them back to the main drive from the external drive, and if they failed, then they were trashed. All files created in the past 2 months were garbage and had to be removed.

All files before that date (not sure what date exactly, but somewhere in the past 2 months or so) were OK. The backup was OK. I haven't backed it up again, I'm running First Aid / Disk Util one more time. No errors reported this time around, though it's been running 2 days again... Why on EARTH is that Disk Util / First Aid so BLOODY SLOW? Inquiring minds want to know...