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Hdiutil won't unmount
Authored by: skydiver on Mar 21, '04 09:05:42AM

I seem to have a pooched partition on my drive. I try to fix or re-format it, Disk Utility tells me that it is in use, and can't unmount it.

When I run hdiutil to try to force the eject, I get this message:

"hdiutil: detach: "disk1s9" failed to unmount due to error 22 (dissenter -1)."

This is a big problem since it's my main OS X partition on this drive! I can't even re-partition or re-format the complete drive, since it simply won't un-mount the drive.

I run df, and it shows the volume, but fstat or lsof does not show that the volume is even in use!

I tried starting up with OS 9.2.2, but it seems to hang at startup, like it's trying to wait for this volume to open. When I have the drive in an external firewire port, I can start it up after booting, but Disk Setup says that it can't initialize it.

Any ideas how to fix this?


---
Blue Skies,
Tak



[ Reply to This | # ]
Wiping out your entire hard drive
Authored by: akejay on Mar 21, '04 10:05:14AM
The following is dangerous - proceed cautiously! Backup and/or disconnect all important devices before doing this! How to clear your entire primary drive and get it ready for repartitioning: 1. Boot the Mac OS X CD (hold C) 2. Go into single-user mode (hold Option-S) 3. Run these commands:

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0 bs=1k count=1k
pdisk /dev/rdisk0 -initialize
reboot
4. Boot the Mac OS X CD (well, it happens by default now) 5. Use Disk Utility to partition the drive 6. Proceed with the installation as normal If you feel lucky, you can also edit the map (partition table) of /dev/rdisk0 interactively by just running "pdisk" and using the prompts. Have fun, - Jake

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