2008-08-28

Time Machine freezes computer

I let Time Machine backup into a sparse bundle on a windows share. This worked a little slow but otherwise fine until yesterday when Time Machine froze my MacBook every time it ran. To get it back running, I had to turn off the MacBook by holding down the power key for a few seconds. After restart, Mac OS told me the reason: a kernel panic with this backtrace:

panic(cpu 0 caller 0x00321C20): "hfs_UNswap_BTNode: invalid forward link (0xABAC0006)\n"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.5.20/bsd/hfs/hfs_endian.c:254
Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x3cb4b768 : 0x12b0fa (0x4592a4 0x3cb4b79c 0x133243 0x0)

After some web search [1], I found out that the reason was probably a defect sparse bundle caused by turning off my computer during backups, which I sometimes do. So the solution was to repair the sparse bundle:

  1. I mounted the windows share on which my Time Machine sparse bundle lies.
    Then, I executed the following commands in the terminal:
  2. Make the sparse bundle available as a device (in my case, it was /dev/disk1, but hdiutil tells you, which device it assigns the sparse bundle to):
    hdiutil attach -nomount -readwrite /Volumes/windows_share/my.sparsebundle
  3. Repair the sparse bundle (this takes some time):
    fsck_hfs -f /dev/disk1

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