Q: Mybook studio raid 0, empty after installing Mavericks

I run a 13 rMPB on Mavericks. Under the previous system, I used Thunderbolt to FireWire to a daisy chain of six LaCie drives, 4 Quadra d2 and 2 Porsche. I use one of the drives for my entire iTunes Library and one for my TimeMachine backup so those two drives at least are absolutely critical to me.

As soon as I upgraded I began to have problems. Drives would appear on the desktop but when I'd double click on them, they wouldn't respond. I would force restart and the drives wouldn't appear at all. In the past I had used Disk Utility to rebuild the directories and I did that repeatedly.

Ultimately, I have done these things:

(a) I have turned off the Energy Saver toggle telling the system to spin down the drives when not needed. This seems to conflict with LaCie's own energy save software. The LaCie functionality still works and the drives do now spin up when needed.

(b) When I shut down, I turn the drives off at the on/off switch. When I restart, I turn the drives back on. I had run into cases in the past where the drives would disappear if I'd had to force shutdown for some reason; turning them off and on always fixed the problem. Now I do it every time.

These two steps, while tedious, seem to have solved the problem for me. Except:

If I every have to restart (as for example with a system upgrade), I anticipate that after the restart I will need to force shutdown, turn off the drives, turn the drives back on and start up. This is concerning but so far so good.

I have been back and forth with LaCie tech support. I'm sympathetic to their plight but so far they haven't been all that helpful. There is a firmware update available for both the Porsche drives and the Quadra D2 drives but I haven't been able to make it work and it requires interacting at the terminal. LaCie's latest suggestion was that I find a Mac with a FireWire port and connect the drives to that machine to do the upgrades. Unfortunately, that won't work since I only have the one machine.

In the meantime, steps (a) and (b) above are working ok enough that I can go on with my life until this all settles out.

HTH.

I have a DVD drive and an old Leopard + Snow Leopard disk - will these do the job too?

Yes that should work.

i am going to install 10.6 on an exernal and try to get at my files.

does anyone have a copy of the dreaded WD Drive Manager software they could send my way? i'll need to install that on my 10.6 drive in order to mount the other drive anyway - and of course now WD has pulled that software from their site.

ps: i have NOT yet mounted the MyBook Studio drive (RAID 1) via mavericks yet, so all my data should still be safe... problem is, i still can't get to it, even with this workaround, without that g**d*** WD manager software. grrr.

Maybe email or contact WD support directly?

It may be on one of the countless sofware download sites like macupdate.com, but I would be very careful about where you download & it install from.

i did hear back from WD support about that question. they informed me that it should work, and also that the WD Manager software is not needed to read or write to the disk - it is only used for config.

I have been using mavericks for the past 5 days and working on my external hard drives. Drives which have all my client's work on has now dissappeared. All my project files. Everything. It says the hard drives have full space. It's renamed my Gtech drives to Mybook or EFI.

I'M SERIOUSLY WORRYING!

The implications of not recovering my work will destroy me. I need a solution. I'm not going to touch my drives until there's some development.

This is by far the most serious issue I've ever faced, and I'm not sure what to do. I don't want to use data recovery because I don't want to make the situation potentially worse.

I need a solution so desperately.

jackrmhardy 

.It says the hard drives have full space. It's renamed my Gtech drives to Mybook or EFI.

..... I don't want to make the situation potentially worse.

At the point your drives register as EFI, corruption has occurred and meta data has been lost.

Recovery at this point will not "make things worse"....

"I'm not going to touch my drives until there's some development."

Any development at this junction for yourself will NOT reverse damage done.

There are several reports of corruption with great success of recovery using Techtool Pro 7

http://www.micromat.com/products/techtool-pro

The other being Disk Warrior

http://www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/

sorry about your occurrence, data loss is traumatic, I know.

If you have a clue how to use Terminal I'd also recommend testdisk & photorec, they are powerful tools that are free, but you will need to spend time reading the wiki pages.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk (partition table recovery)

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec (file carving - locates files on disk without metadata).

I also use Disk Warrior.

This cannot be happening. My business, my livlihood. Everything is on these hard drives. I'm speachless. There's so many bad repercussions if I don't get the data on these hard drives back.

join the club

Never upgrade to near beta OS on a production machine! Simple as that. And sorry, too.

I'm finding the same thing with my external Seagate drive.

When I boot up, sometimes it doesn't show up.

It shows a lot of activity, and it seems to be running fsck_hfs for a long time (I don't get it, it's a journaled volume).

Eventually it comes back after about an hour or so.

verify same on another Mac, in your case indications would merely be a dying SATA bridge card.

"At the point your drives register as EFI, corruption has occurred and meta data has been lost."

Could you explain this a little, please; what is EFI? My main internal hard drive shows the following in EntreCheck:

Disk Information:

          Hitachi HDS721010DLE630 disk0 : (1 TB)

                    EFI (disk0s1) <not mounted>: 209.7 MB

                    Silver iMac HD (disk0s2) /: 751.32 GB (262.01 GB free)

                    Recovery HD (disk0s3) <not mounted>: 650 MB

                    Silver iMac 2nd partn (disk0s4) /Volumes/Silver iMac 2nd partn: 247.89 GB (247.54 GB free)

The last three lines are correct, so what is the line starting "EFI"?

I've just run DiskRepair (which was required by Verify Disk) and Repair Permissions and the disc is working properly (and seemed to be before the repair). Should I be concerned?

I was just giving the short answer to Jackhardy who had a corrupted drive, and his like others RAID, are appearing as "MyBook" and "EFI" post-corruption in D.U.

The EFI System partition is used by computers that adhere to the Extensible Firmware Interface. It contains the boot load programs for all operating systems installed on the other partitions

**WHY this is being overwritten to the data-filled personal external HD is a mystery the code and OS gurus will have to figure out

You can read about same here

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFI_System_partition

No, I see no reason for you to be concerned about your internal HD. Theres not yet been one indicated of a corrupted internal boot volume (that Im aware of)

Thanks, Plotinus. I had read the wiki entry but I was after reassurance, which you've provided.