FirstAid has failed on an external exFAT HDD created in 1969??

[Chrisk-K]

I just wanted to check my two external drives (one SSD the other rotating) using FirstAid of my M1 Mini running Big Sur. No issue was found on the external APFS SSD as expected.

However, FirstAid failed on the external exFAT rotating hard drive and gave me the following lines.

"File system check exit code is 0.
Restoring the original state found as mounted.
An internal error has occurred. : (-69610)"

"Get info" shows the correct volume name (i.e., Mac & PC) of the exFAT drive but shows "Unknown" as the volume type. I use this exFAT drive as a file backup drive for my Mac and PC. A really weird thing is that the created date is Dec. 31, 1969 and the modified date is Jan 1, 1980 (what the heck?). Those dates are correctly listed for my external SSD and another external rotating drive used for Time Machine.

The interesting thing is I haven't encountered any error with the exFAT hard drive, and my Windows 10 machine's disk error checking shows no problem with the exFAT drive.

I could back up the contents of the exFAT drive and reformat it to see if that would solve the problem. But I'd like to know what might be going on... Comments are welcome!

 

[chscag]

I have to ask.....

Why would you use exFAT as a format to backup your Mac or for that matter your PC? ExFAT is a non journaling file format and is easily subjected to errors which normally can not be resolved.

Use HFS+ or APFS for your Mac backups and NTFS for backing up your PC. Those file formats are journaled and usually can be repaired unless the drive itself is damaged.

You attempted to repair exFAT using First Aid. First Aid (from Disk Utility) works fairly well for HFS+ and APFS, however, it was never designed for any of the FAT file formats.

Use the file repair utility (chkdsk) that came with Windows to see if it can repair the exFAT drive. If that fails, it's likely the drive can not be repaired.

And, Welcome to our forums.

 

[Chrisk-K]

Thanks for your reply.

My plan was to use the external mechanical HDD to move audio backup files between my Mac and PC. Hence, I used exFAT for the HDD.

I've never had an issue with the exFAT HDD when moving files between my Mac and PC. I just wanted to check using First Aid and was suprised to see the error.

The Windows chkdsk shows no problem with the exFAT HDD. So, the error shown in First Aid is probably nothing.

But I'm so curious as to why the created date is Dec. 31, 1969 although I formatted the HDD in March 2021!

 

[chscag]

The reason the date shows as Dec 31, 1969 is a mystery. I’ve had that happen before when the system date was wrong on my Mac. But I have not seen that happen for a very long time.

It’s okay to use exFAT to move data between your Mac and PC. However, a better way would be to network them together. That might require a bit more work on your part though.

Your exFAT drive is probably okay if chkdsk found no errors.

 

[Chrisk-K]

I want to keep my computers immaculate. So, although the exFAT drive works fine, I'll reformat it when I'm bored

 

[ferrarr]

What partition scheme is the exFAT drive?

GUID?
Master Boot Record?
Apple Partition Map?

Also, was the drive created on macOS or winOS?