-36 error on external My Passport for Mac can't repair disk.

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Level 2

187 points

-36 error on external My Passport for Mac can't repair disk.

I'm on a Late 2012 iMac using Catalina. My external drive is My Passport for Mac 5 TB. It's in 3 partitions. One partition never shows up on my desktop. One always shows up and the one I'm having issues with shows up eventually on the desktop after a few hours. Problem is when it shows up I get the macOS can't repair My Passport for Mac Files You can still open or copy files on the disk. Back up the disk and reformat it as soon as you can.

Problem is my photo library is on this partition and every time I try to copy it to my desktop or another external drive i get the -36 error. How do I fix this? I don't have another hard drive that is 5 TB to copy everything over but am planning to get one soon. I just really want to copy my photos library over. My internal drive was getting full which is why I originally moved it onto this external drive.

Took at look at Disk Utility and the partition that always shows up is:

1. My Passport Extra 2TB is formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled),

2. the other one that takes hours to show up My Passport for Mac Files 2TB is formatted Mac OS Extended

3. the 3rd partition which never shows up and I thought was an old internal back up is titled disk2s2 below it has USB External APFS Physical Store.

Should I go into that 3rd partition titles disk2s2 and format it differently? Thinking the format is why this one never shows up and maybe the one that takes hours should be formatted Mac OS Extended (Journaled)?

Any help would be appreciated.

Posted on Jan 13, 2025 5:22 PM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

62,150 points

Jan 17, 2025 9:32 PM in response to spiralgirl

-36 error is an I/O Error which is usually due to a hardware issue with the drive although it could also be due to a bad connection/cable. However, since only one partition out of three on the drive has a problem, it means the hard drive is failing with the bad sectors located within that partition.

I highly recommend you stop using the drive immediately since most consumer grade apps including macOS are not able to handle the I/O Errors produced by a failing hard drive. The more you attempt to access the drive the worst the drive failure will become until even a professional data recovery service will be unable to recover any data from it.

If you don't have a backup of the data on that drive, then I highly recommend you contact a professional data recovery service since you usually only have one chance at recovering the data from a failing hard drive, so choose wisely.

If you want to confirm the external hard drive is failing, then run the third party app DriveDx (free trial period) and post the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper on the forum editing toolbar. You will need to install a special USB driver in order to attempt to check the health of the external drive. The DriveDx health report can help us judge how bad the failure is.

If the data you store on your computer and external media (including the cloud) is unique & important, then you should have frequent & regular backups of that data on your computer and all external media. The more important the data, the more backup copies you should have. Apple provides the Time Machine backup software for free with macOS in order to make it easy for people to make backups.

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Answer 2

rkaufmann87

Level 10

145,438 points

Jan 13, 2025 8:09 PM in response to spiralgirl

Do you have any of the following types of third party apps installed?

Antivirus
Cleaning
Security
VPN
Maintenance

If you do, please uninstall per the developers instructions and moving forward DO NOT reinstall for any reason!!!!

Then restart the computer in Safe Mode. To do this simply restart with the keyboard plugged into the back of the Mac and hold down the Shift Key until it restarts, this can take up to 10 minutes. Then restart normally and test.

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