This morning, I woke up to my laptop complaining that it couldn't back up to my external hard drive. Weird, right? My laptop is a Macbook Pro, for context. I pop open Disk Utility and run a first aid. The disk is busted, apparently. It has been mounted as read-only for some baffling reason. It cannot be repaired for ??? reasons. The data on it seems to be fine. I use it both for Time Machine backups and long term storage of a few files I rarely need. Everything on it can be read and is intact. My computer just refuses to write to it under any circumstances. I futz about with error codes and google for a bit, but turn up nothing particularly helpful.
Okay, no matter. The backups are mostly so that if my laptop explodes, I can get going again without losing more than a day. I can copy the files onto a USB key temporarily. If I just erase the drive, I can take a new backup and everything is great. Right?
This is where things get really fucky. I cannot erase the drive.
The drive refuses to erase because it cannot unmount. It cannot unmount because it is in use. I spent some time trying to figure out what is using it, because I am definitely not. I reboot a couple times just in case. Eventually, I figure out that something called "mds_store" is using it, which turns out to be Spotlight's indexing agent.
Did you know that it is impossible to stop Spotlight from indexing the drive? Oh, you might think that turning Spotlight off, disabling Spotlight's options, adding the drive to the list of things not to index, turning Spotlight off from the command line, wiping the settings again, killing the process via Activity Manager, etc, would make it stop. But no. You would be wrong. There is no force on Earth that can convince Spotlight to stop indexing this drive. There is no force on Earth that can convince my laptop that hey, I'm trying to erase the drive, just fucking erase it and forget about the indexing.
No, my laptop is determined to index this drive. mds_store has priority and by god is mds_store going to use it, damn my wishes. My current only hope is that maybe it will finish indexing if I give it enough time. I'm not convinced. Based on the amount of content on the drive (a few big things) and the connection speed, indexing should only take a few moments.
I guess there is a possibility of hardware failure, but it feels unlikely for a flash drive to just suddenly give out with no warning or obvious cause, right? Is that possible? Why can I still read all the data if so?
To summarize: my drive broke for seemingly no reason. Despite this, all the data is intact and readable. My laptop is convinced that it is not writable for seemingly no reason. My laptop is spending hours indexing for seemingly no reason. I cannot compel my laptop to just wipe the whole sorry mess and start over. I've gone into obscure settings. I've tried terminal commands from StackExchange threads. I've rebooted and unplugged and replugged and maybe screamed a little.
I'm fucking pissed. Erasing a drive should not be hard. It should not be hard. Please dear god someone help me.