How long should First Aid take?

[spock999]

Running High Sierra on MBPro. Wanted to confirm that the internal disc was OK so started First Aid. It warned me that it would lock the disk and that would freeze the apps.

It has been sitting there without showing any progress for at least 30 mins. MY SSD is 500Gb and I have the fast processor (3GHz Dual i7) with 8Gb RAM. Not sure whether it is locked or is just nurdling away. How can I tell and is there a safe way toi break into it if necessary.

Thanks.

 

[Slydude]

The time First Aid takes does depend upon the size of the drive but usually doesn't take half an hour. For a drive the size that you have a few minutes should usually be sufficient.

If the process is taking half an hour my bet would be one of three things:
1. The program has hung up/stopped responding. This can happen even if there are no actual problems with the drive.
2. There are some directory structure porblems that Disk Utility is having trouble resolving.
3. Problems communicating with the drive. There can be numerous reasons for this.

I've had this happen a few times. I can usually stop the process by pressing Command, Option, and Escape simultaneously. Continue to hold the keys for a bit hte Mac may be slow to respond. If that doesn't work you may be forced to power down and reboot the system.

 

[spock999]

Thanks. I did in fact have to power down. Having also checked various forum threads, it seems that this isn't unusual with High Sierra. They mention that it may be something to do with the APFS system.

Anyway, I did try it again in recovery mode and it whipped through in seconds and gave an exit code of 0 - which I take to be OK.

 

[ferrarr]

There is the drive, and then there are the partitions on the drive. When in Disk Utility (DU), you need to make sure you have "Show All Devices" enabled under the "View" menu. This will show all partitions on the drive.