I use a 16TB Western Digital drive for Plex storage, and movie files are starting to show as zero bytes. I thought this community could help. Some added details:

  1. MacOS Sonoma running on M1 Mac Mini
  2. Western Digital drive (exFAT) 16TB
  3. Connected via USB-A
  4. I have tried connecting the drive to another computer… no luck
  5. Ran the “first aid” program from disk utility. No luck.

Any suggestions?

  • Sopel97@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Use a Windows machine and chkdsk.

    NEVER do that

    For good measure you can do a surface scan too

    yea, sure, kill it completely

    • dr100@alien.topBEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      NEVER do that

      But what, run the mac something?! NOTE: everything I recommended is AFTER YOU MADE AN IMAGE OF THE DISK!

      yea, sure, kill it completely

      Well, if it’s dead already how you can confirm it, at least to take out of circulation?

        • dr100@alien.topBEnglish
          1·
          10 months ago

          I wasn’t suggesting to run it on the image, just to have the image for reference before doing unpredictable things you can’t undo, but if you want you can run it there too for a test (even better have a reflinked copy so you can play as much as you like). It’ll just flag/correct if possible whatever inconsistencies you have in the filesystem, with its native tool. What’s wrong with that?

          • Sopel97@alien.topBEnglish
            1·
            10 months ago

            It’ll just flag/correct if possible whatever inconsistencies you have in the filesystem, with its native tool.

            Nothing wrong I guess, as long as you don’t care about the data