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Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

My WD MyBook studio 2TB (fw800) suddenly shows up empty on my desktop after a Mavericks upfrade on my mid 2009 mbp.

 

Disk Drill is now scanning the WD, and the files are there, about 1,4 TB of it...

 

How do I get the disc structure back?

 

I have no Mountain Lion OS-mac to test the WD in..

 

I had a bootable Mountain Lion on the WD, could that be the problem?

 

In Disk Drill MyBook has four units; EFI(200Mb), MyBook(1,8Tb), Unallocated 128Mb and Lost partition (200Mb)

iOS 7, Ipad mini + ios7

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 1:08 AM

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Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

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  • by Drew Reece,

    Drew Reece Drew Reece Dec 9, 2013 4:57 PM in response to estApple
    Level 5 (7,659 points)
    Notebooks
    Dec 9, 2013 4:57 PM in response to estApple

    Launchd jobs:

    LaunchAgents          - Stored in /Library/LaunchAgents

    LaunchDaemons       - Stored in /Library/LaunchDaemons

    User LaunchAgents   - Stored in ~/Library/LaunchAgents

     

    I think the WD uninstaller leaves some jobs in place too, so if you remove via that tool check again for more com.westerndigital.WD jobs!

     

    https://discussions.apple.com/message/23949908?ac_cid=tw123456#23949908

     

    I think R C-R had removal instructions earlier too.

  • by jadbel3,

    jadbel3 jadbel3 Dec 9, 2013 5:14 PM in response to estApple
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 9, 2013 5:14 PM in response to estApple

    Hey estApple,

     

    Perhaps the reason mine worked is because this is a brand new MacBook Pro with Mavericks and no previous OS. So that would mean there is nothing else cluttering up the HD, such as older OS. The pictures you see in my message of Migration Assistant were copied and pasted off the internet. I tried to take snapshots of my own but it wouldn't work. I don't know what you have but if you upgraded from a previous OS perhaps Migration Assistant needs updating. I noticed the pictures were differnet on different OS's. I know from experience in the past with my late 2006 20" iMac with Tiger OS every time I upgraded to the next OS older apps had to be updated or completely replaced. Personally I don't think Apple spends enough time testing their new OS's with the previous ones to see if they work together or mesh. When I got to Lion I couldn't go any further because that old late 2006 wasn't compatible with the newer OS's. My wife has a 2010 MacBook 17" that started with Snow Leopard then Lion and I recently upgraded it to Mavericks. I skipped Mountain Lion. She hasn't complained so I guess it's working for her.

    BTW, Lion is what is on my WD hard drive.

    I'm puzzled about yours and everyone elses situation here. I hope Apple is taking this seriously.

    Sorry I can't help.

  • by bigd_pdx,

    bigd_pdx bigd_pdx Dec 9, 2013 6:28 PM in response to GetRealBro
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Dec 9, 2013 6:28 PM in response to GetRealBro

    I've always had my WD external triple interface (FW800, eSata, USB 2.0) drives fail to mount regularly via FW800.  I just unplugged the FW800, mounted them via USB 2.0 and ejected.  They would then mount immediately via FW800 for a seemingly indeterminate amount of time (indeterminate simply because I didn't observe the cadence of the failures).  Have you tried this in your tests?  It was my "go to" fix for a long time pre-Mavericks.

     

    Also, I've still not incurred any corruption (*knock on wood*) from any of my external WD HDD's.  I've had Mavericks on 4 machines so far and I've got a number of WD drives with various interfaces.  I'm still using them because I have backups of most all of the data (the information I don't have backed up is reproducable).  I've slept, rebooted, mounted/unmounted, normal use. 

     

    D

    GetRealBro wrote:

     

    estApple wrote:

     

    Since we do not know the reasons of the issue, it may not be a good idea to repair the WD disk with the Disk Utility if we want to recover the data later. We do not know what modifications the Disk utility would do during the repairing. It may perform something that would make data less recoverable.

    I agree. For people who can wait, just putting the external drive on a shelf until the dust settles is good advice. But for people who need access to their data sooner than that....

     

    Disk Utility is simply a nice OSX GUI application that runs low level unix drive management commands. For example, the Disk Utility First Aid: Verify and Repair buttons run fsck_hfs (AKA file system check for hierarchal file systems). The former has the flags set to just check the file system, the later’s flags are set to try to repair it.

     

    My reading of this thread says that after updating/installing 10.9 the problems with external drives  fall in to two main groups.

     

    Group 1 - the external drive has been “spontaneously” repartitioned and a new (empty) directory structure has been written to the drive/partition. This is the most serious problem, since the directory structure no longer points to the files/folders that are almost certainly still on the drive/partition. Disk Utility is of no real value/harm to this group. People with this symptom will need to run 3rd party file recovery applications to retrieve their data. This is usually a long and tedious task, since the file/folder names are no longer associated with the data.

     

    Group 2 - the external drive/partition fails to mount or takes a very long time to mount. This is much less serious, since the directory structure still points to the filles/folders. But, for reasons that are still not clear, 10.9 believes the directory is damaged. In my testing, the directory structure was usually (but not always) OK. Disk Utility is probably a useful tool for these people BUT ONLY IF they are patient and allow any long fsck_hfs run to complete before running Disk Utility. In my testing Disk Utility was always able to repair the directory structure and no data was lost. You can only be sure that the fsck_hfs run has completed by monitoring the fsck_hfs log. You can easily monitor this log  with the nice OSX GUI utility — Console (in the application Utilities folder). Just click on  /var/log and scroll down to fsck_hfs.log.

     

    —- GetRealBro

  • by GetRealBro,

    GetRealBro GetRealBro Dec 9, 2013 8:45 PM in response to bigd_pdx
    Level 1 (21 points)
    Dec 9, 2013 8:45 PM in response to bigd_pdx

    bigd_pdx wrote:

     

    I've always had my WD external triple interface (FW800, eSata, USB 2.0) drives fail to mount regularly via FW800.  I just unplugged the FW800, mounted them via USB 2.0 and ejected.  They would then mount immediately via FW800 for a seemingly indeterminate amount of time (indeterminate simply because I didn't observe the cadence of the failures).  Have you tried this in your tests?

    That’s interesting. When you say “I've always had my WD external triple interface (FW800, eSata, USB 2.0) drives fail to mount regularly via FW800.”, how far back is “always” e.g. 10.6.8, 10.7, 10.8 or just since 10.9?

     

    To answer you question, the Seagate 3T BackUp Plus drive I’ve been testing has interchangeable basses with different interfaces (e.g. USB 2 or FW800+USB2 or USB 3). I’ve only tested this drive using the bases with FW800+USB2 and USB3. Most of my testing was using the FW800 cable with the FW800+USB2 base. In limited testing, the mounting problem was more difficult (but not impossible) to reproduce when using the USB 2 cable on the same base. Frankly the only use I have for a drive that only works correctly with a USB 2 interface is Time Machine, because it really doesn’t matter how long it takes to backup via Time Machine.

     

    I have 6 of these Seagate drives and never had mounting problems when using the FW800 interface with 10.6.8.  My experience is that the FW800 interface, in conjunction with OSX 10.9, dramatically increases the odds for the slow mounting problem.

     

    —GetRealBro

  • by estApple,

    estApple estApple Dec 9, 2013 10:20 PM in response to estApple
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 9, 2013 10:20 PM in response to estApple

    Has the new WD Drive Manager resolved the issue of hard disk being set to empty?

  • by bigd_pdx,

    bigd_pdx bigd_pdx Dec 10, 2013 4:50 AM in response to GetRealBro
    Level 1 (10 points)
    Dec 10, 2013 4:50 AM in response to GetRealBro

    Sorry, always was a bit ambiguous.  I bought them when I was running 10.6.8 and they exhibited this behavior right out of the box.  I use them as FW800 drives but when they fail to mount I just mount/dismount them via USB 2.0 and then they mount fine as FW800 for a time. 

     

    D

    GetRealBro wrote:

     

    bigd_pdx wrote:

     

    I've always had my WD external triple interface (FW800, eSata, USB 2.0) drives fail to mount regularly via FW800.  I just unplugged the FW800, mounted them via USB 2.0 and ejected.  They would then mount immediately via FW800 for a seemingly indeterminate amount of time (indeterminate simply because I didn't observe the cadence of the failures).  Have you tried this in your tests?

    That’s interesting. When you say “I've always had my WD external triple interface (FW800, eSata, USB 2.0) drives fail to mount regularly via FW800.”, how far back is “always” e.g. 10.6.8, 10.7, 10.8 or just since 10.9?

     

    To answer you question, the Seagate 3T BackUp Plus drive I’ve been testing has interchangeable basses with different interfaces (e.g. USB 2 or FW800+USB2 or USB 3). I’ve only tested this drive using the bases with FW800+USB2 and USB3. Most of my testing was using the FW800 cable with the FW800+USB2 base. In limited testing, the mounting problem was more difficult (but not impossible) to reproduce when using the USB 2 cable on the same base. Frankly the only use I have for a drive that only works correctly with a USB 2 interface is Time Machine, because it really doesn’t matter how long it takes to backup via Time Machine.

     

    I have 6 of these Seagate drives and never had mounting problems when using the FW800 interface with 10.6.8.  My experience is that the FW800 interface, in conjunction with OSX 10.9, dramatically increases the odds for the slow mounting problem.

     

    —GetRealBro

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Dec 10, 2013 3:42 PM in response to GetRealBro
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Dec 10, 2013 3:42 PM in response to GetRealBro

     

    GetRealBro wrote:

    Anyone who does not already have one or more of these disaster recovery tools readily at hand needs to re-read this thread from the beginning and ask themselves a simple question?

     

     

    DiskWarrior, etc. etc. all data recovery software is not a 'disaster recovery tool'   its a    "I didnt prepare for inevitable drive failure and data loss due to X reason"

     

    Anytime someone NEEDS DiskWarrior or another data recovery tool   then there was a fundamental wrong turn taken from the beginning where partial or total lack of HD / data redundancy wasn't put in place.

     

     

    You always have to be prepared to be able to say when your HD fails/ gets corrupted   "So what, let me grab the copy to that drive over here"

     

    Having one hard drive (namely now that theyre SO cheap) as your primary is like sending a single soldier into a battle, ...cant end good.

     

     


  • by lkrupp,

    lkrupp lkrupp Dec 10, 2013 4:12 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 5 (4,235 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 10, 2013 4:12 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    It's never a question of IF a hard drive will fail, but a question of WHEN. All hard drives WILL fail, period, end of story. Having a workable data recovery and backup plan is essential. In this digital age we have heard the screams of agony when a user loses thousands of family pictures, videos, etc. Archivists and historians are worried. No longer will we find the shoebox full of pictures in the attic that fills the gap in our family history. Believe it or not there was a time when audio recordings were made on a spool of very thin steel wire. My father had a Sears Silvertone Wire recorder he used to record rehearsals of the dance band he played the piano in. When my parents passed I found the spools of wire and it took a long time to find someone on the Internet who could transcribe this wire recording to an audio CD. I got lucky.

     

    So not only do we have think about preserving the data itself but also the format. In a hundred years who knows what audio and video formats will be in use or whether equipment will still be around to convert our mp3's and mp4s to be playable on current technology. Lots of family and societal history could be lost because the digital data is so fragile.

  • by PlotinusVeritas,

    PlotinusVeritas PlotinusVeritas Dec 10, 2013 4:23 PM in response to lkrupp
    Level 6 (14,806 points)
    Dec 10, 2013 4:23 PM in response to lkrupp

     

    lkrupp wrote:

     

    It's never a question of IF a hard drive will fail, but a question of WHEN.

     

    So not only do we have think about preserving the data itself but also the format

     

     

    I know, I wrote a user tip on that whole topic 

     

    https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031

     

     

    There are only two kinds of hard drives, those that have failed, and those that will fail, regardless of quality of manufacture.

     

     

     

    The format on long term storage are century disks. Professional archival DVD media  (same mentioned in user tip)

     

     

     

    Unfortunately WD new HD firmware has created a new era of issues being looked into (unrelated to Mavericks in specific, as is indicated)

     


  • by R C-R,

    R C-R R C-R Dec 10, 2013 4:28 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 6 (17,685 points)
    Dec 10, 2013 4:28 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    PlotinusVeritas wrote:

    Anytime someone NEEDS DiskWarrior or another data recovery tool   then there was a fundamental wrong turn taken from the beginning where partial or total lack of HD / data redundancy wasn't put in place.

    I think you have lost track of what this topic is about. You are talking to users who have had problems with their external drives; specifically either spontaneous, unrequested reformatting of the drive or some form of data corruption, both of which in some instances have affected all their external drives.

     

    It is not that they didn't implement data redundancy, it is that that redundancy was wiped out. For those users where this was caused by an incompatibility of the old WD utility software with Mavericks, their only alternative is data recovery software, as confirmed by WD.

  • by R C-R,

    R C-R R C-R Dec 10, 2013 4:30 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas
    Level 6 (17,685 points)
    Dec 10, 2013 4:30 PM in response to PlotinusVeritas

    PlotinusVeritas wrote:

    Unfortunately WD new HD firmware has created a new era of issues being looked into (unrelated to Mavericks in specific, as is indicated)

    I'm not sure what you mean by this but it has been well established that the sudden reformat problem is linked to the WD utility software, not the drives' firmware.

  • by jeffsphoto21,

    jeffsphoto21 jeffsphoto21 Dec 10, 2013 4:50 PM in response to R C-R
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 10, 2013 4:50 PM in response to R C-R

    Beg to differ. It's been well established that the problem of wiped/reformatted/whatever was a generic Mavericks problem, regardless of the drive you use, e.g. WD or Seagate.

  • by petermac87,

    petermac87 petermac87 Dec 10, 2013 5:02 PM in response to jeffsphoto21
    Level 5 (7,402 points)
    Dec 10, 2013 5:02 PM in response to jeffsphoto21

    jeffsphoto21 wrote:

     

    Beg to differ. It's been well established that the problem of wiped/reformatted/whatever was a generic Mavericks problem, regardless of the drive you use, e.g. WD or Seagate.

    Interesting, can you please post the link to this.

     

    Thank you

     

    Pete

  • by Chastings,

    Chastings Chastings Dec 10, 2013 5:08 PM in response to petermac87
    Level 1 (57 points)
    Mac OS X
    Dec 10, 2013 5:08 PM in response to petermac87

    Jeffphoto21,

     

    No link is necessary. Pete has a lot of free time and trolls for these type of statements.

     

    Please continue to post valuable information so we can track progress on the problem.

     

    Thanks to all that have posted to this thread. It has been very helpful.

     

    Curt

  • by beejaysoo,

    beejaysoo beejaysoo Dec 10, 2013 5:13 PM in response to petermac87
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Dec 10, 2013 5:13 PM in response to petermac87

    After installing Mavericks on my iMac,  Time Machine apparently overloaded my LaCie drive and stopped operating.. When I read some of these terrifying posts, I disconnected my LaCie hard drive.  Waiting for resolution.

     

    At this same time I had just bought a new WD MyBook and when I contacted WD for advice they suggested I hold off on connecting the WD drive.

     

    bj

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