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So in trying to troubleshoot a computer I found that one of our teacher laptops had Journaling disabled which caused 2 hard drive failures. I'm now trying to figure out what caused journaling to be disabled. Looking at making an extension attribute to find any other machines in our district that may have journaling disabled so I can see if this issue is wide spread (hopefully not being caused by Casper Imaging).



Anyone else with this issue? Or any help scripting the extension attribute? I'm sure I can do a diskutil -list and pull info from there.



Thanks for any help provided!
Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools

I see it mostly on repairs, where non-Apple installed hard drives were used. Most manufacturers won't pre-initialize with Journaling - the drive has to be reinitialized later and sometimes that step gets missed with repairs and replacements.



We have a search group for that attribute to keep an eye on how many are popping up out there.


I see the image that we had as our base is only extended without journaling.
Causing all sorts of problems.



Trying to find a command to reenable.



Gabe Shackney
Princeton Public Schools


There is:



diskutil enableJournal /


but I'm not sure whether that one requires reinitializing or whether it can be added on the fly…..you could try it on a drive that doesn't matter first to see if it preserves data or deletes it.


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