My NAS WD drive recently became corrupt. It had trouble saving large files and running them. My router constantly complained about not being able to properly run Samba/swap on it.

Not having a Linux OS handy, I had a tall task to repair an EXT4 filesystem on Mac OSX 10.10.

I first tried the open source solutions: fuse-ext2, osxfuse, and ext2fuse (read-only). While these tools work great in allowing access to ext4. They do not include any disk repair tools. e2fsprogs from Homebrew also does not include the fsck utilities.

I also tried using the commercial ExtFS by Paragon. It integrates directly with Disk Utility and is able to verify/check the disk for errors. While it reported the errors properly, it had trouble repairing the filesystem and reported my ext4 partition as ext3. It failed to repair reporting: “Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.” Also, ExtFS was very buggy as in it consistently froze the System Preferences and Finder (while ejecting and mounting).

Finally, I installed VirtualBox with an Ubuntu VM and added the USB drive from settings. I had to umount the drive from inside Ubuntu and running fsck -y was a breeze. Now ExtFS by Paragon also reports that the Disk is good.