How to Gather Volume Dump File in macOS

This is an instruction in case a support engineer has sent you a file system dump utility and asked you to gather file system dump.

What is a file system dump and what it includes.

A file system dump is a file containing technical details of a partition. It can give Paragon engineers required information about the file system, possible errors, file structure and such.

It does not include any file content or other personal data stored on the disk. Although it contains names of files and folders.

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Please download the terminal executable from here (right click - Download linked file as...), extract the fsdump file from fsdump.zip to Desktop folder, and perform the following actions:

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1. Open Terminal (in Finder, navigate to Applications - Utilities - Terminal). Enter:
   

   diskutil list

2. Unmount (do not disconnect!) the disk device: type
   

   diskutil unmount /dev/diskXsY
   

   where "diskXsY" is the disk identifier.

   If you get "Can't open "/dev/diskXsY" : Resource busy" message when running ./fsdump command, most likely the disk was still mounted, so make sure it's not.
   
   

3. Navigate to Desktop folder: type
   

   cd Desktop
   

4. Type the following command:
   
   Volume:
   sudo ./fsdump /dev/diskXsY | bzip2  > fsdump_diskXsY.bz2
   
   Enter your password to proceed.
   
   
5. The required file will appear in Desktop folder. Please ensure it's not 14 bytes in size (which means it's empty, and most likely wrong Disk/Volume was specified)

If you're still getting empty file, please copy Terminal output and send it to Support Team.

If you need to create dump of the Macintosh HD partition, please boot in recovery mode and create the dump from there.