Q: Serious external drive problems after installing Mavericks

No, I recommend two different programs from various developers that I use has been for many years to recover data from hundreds of users' computers. I've been doing data recovery since the time of PPC and express their opinion only and not commercial.

Of course using these programs I write developers of problems found with their programs and have early access to beta versions of many DIY recovery software.

Alex

Apple Support Professional

I am now in the crowd of catastrophic data losers from Mavericks and Western Digital. I have lost two WD drives using Mavericks in the last two weeks. One on the MacPro internal bus (startup), the other on a external esata bus (10,000+ image files). Both, when viewed in disk utility, show partitions renamed by unknown source as TM BU or similar. TM BU is my drive name for my Time Machine backups.

I see lots of complaints here, but few actual solutions. Other than data recovery, with which, filenames may or may not come back. This makes the data recovery option useless for me on 10,000 image files. I do have a 10 day old clone as a fall back.

My actions are going to be the following...

-boot into mountain lion clone and see if the "broken" partition shows up correctly. Copy data

-attempt DiskWarrior repair on "broken" partition, if an easy fix can be achieved, mount and copy data.

-boot into mavericks start up, use back drive (10,000 images) to copy to SEAGATE drive and use it as hero drive, perhaps repurpose suspect WD drives as back up drives

Any other ideas are welcome. My weekend, now shot to ****, for the second time in two weeks. Russ

This started on Seagate Drives. And I have had more problems with Seagate, which was my go to brand since Apple used them, before all this than I have ever with WD. I have a drawer full of replaced Seagates that work just fine, but I don't trust them. Looks like it's not a brand issue, but an EHD issue. The only time I have ever had a drive renamed for TM is when I clicked the wrong button on the pop up asking it I wanted the drive to used as a TM BU, even though I have TM turned off. Even then all the data that was on it was untouched, in perfect order and a TM folder name for the back ups was created and they were put in there. Leaving all the rest of the data untouched. We use to have problems like this back in the SCSI days with bad connections and cabling.

DiscWarrior has always been my saviour. It has saved my *** many times fixing the data tables.

In my case, the disks were ejected properly and computer was powered off. On restart, one partition of the volume mounted fine, second partition on same volume did not mount. Tried several restarts, no go. Looked at DiskUtiliy and the one partition shows normal, second is greyed out, labeled as TM BU. Cannot be mounted or repaired. I did not click on anything regarding Time Machine. Have yet to get to the drive, as am doing redunant backups of current data... again. All disks formatted with apple diskutility, NO WD software on system.

And that's been a ticker since day one I forgot to mention. NEVER install or use the manufacturers anything software on a new or extinsting drive. That's the beauty of the Mac OS, is that it has everything one needs to take care of the implementation and low level maintenance of a drive.

That's the beauty of the Mac OS, is that it has everything one needs to take care of the implementation and low level maintenance of a drive.

Except when MaxOS goes seriously wrong, like now.

I'm sorry. I was thinking back to the good ol' days before Apple got so tyrannical and started telling us that what all is included these days is exactly and all we need. But compared to PC's . . .

Boy it was so easy to use and deal with EHD's way back.

I've been keeping up to date on this Maverick's issue, and I've read where it is able to be reproduced, and there is a temporary work around to keep it from happening until Apple does something about it. This issue envolves bad data that causes sytem to hang also.

DISABLE Journaling.

From terminal :

Last login: Wed Apr  2 22:29:50 on ttys000

Jerrys-iMac:~ JerryC$ diskutil disableJournal TEST

Journaling has been disabled for volume TEST on disk5s2

Jerrys-iMac:~ JerryC$ diskutil enableJournal TEST

Journaling has been enabled for volume TEST on disk5s2

Jerrys-iMac:~ JerryC$

Don't know if you can still do it through Maverick's, but you can go into DiskUtility click on drive. Hold Option Key, then select FILE and Disable Journaling.

Hope this helps everyone.

JD

hi do we have a solution to fixing the issue with mybook studio II 2tb drives ,  I have a similar issue to all but I am not precious about the data on the mybook drive I just want to be able to use it again as a 2TB time machine backup drive (although I guess i should worry about that !!).  Mine works ,  starts up on but ejects itself after about 10 mins of activity with either Time machine writing to it or disk utility trying to repair it.  I have managed a backup of 700G but cant trust it .  Id like to start fresh with the 2TB and re partition with disk utility but it says cant unmount the drive and at same time the drive ejects.  is my $300 investemtn down the pan whats the best thing to do  ?

hi I tried turning off Journaling but there were still imcompatibilites with the IMAC mavericks and the WB Mybook,  disk Utilkity wont run you can see my full test at https://discussions.apple.com/message/25763528?tstart=0#25763528.  last message in the thread.  re your comment "Don't know if you can still do it through Maverick's, but you can go into DiskUtility click on drive. Hold Option Key, then select FILE and Disable Journaling."  yes this is still available in mavericks and I can confirm Journaling is off when I info the drive  -  its the drive partition/volume that I can turn journaling off on ot the actual drive entity.  Thanks for your help what a massive waste of som many peoples time and Data  :-(

So I'll add to this thread with some details I have learned.  We updated to Maverick last night and after a reboot our Toshiba external hard drive stopped working and was "corrupted".  My wife panicked since it's her work computer and all of her graphics files were on there.  We talked on the phone for a bit and I suggested she try hooking up the external drive to our sons Macbook Pro which hasn't been updated yet to see if it would work.  Guess what....it works perfectly fine on the old iOS.  So that tells me that the new iOS is the problem. 

What's frustrating is that Apple doesn't seem to be owning up to it and isn't offering any help.  There advice, buy a new external drive.  Lame if you ask me. 

Would love to know if anyone has figured out how to make this work without all the data recovery tactics.

You are referring to Mac OS, right? (Just checking since you mentioned iOS which is the OS for iDevices, not computers). Was the external drive plugged in when you upgraded to Mavericks? I have always followed the advice I got quite some time ago to disconnect any external drives, etc. before upgrading.

Unfortunately, I've never had a problem and I do not have anything plugged in when I upgrade or update, so I'm not sure what to suggest in your situation, except this: did you format the hard drive originally and do you have any software installed that had come with the external drive? If so, uninstall it - there is no need for that software as external hard drives to not need it.

Sorry, I was referring to the Mac OS and it's an iMac.  The hard drive was connected when I performed the update and I must have missed the instructions to disconnect anything external when performing this update.  I may need to pay more attention. 

The external hard drive was formatted with my wifes prior Macbook and we transferred it to the iMac about 1.5 years ago.  We never had any problems with it and as mentioned in my earlier post, my sons Macbook Pro can read it fine so it is not corrupted and this is an Apple OS related issue. 

It appears the issue has been going on for some time so I'm surprised no one else has discovered that the old operating system will run the external drive.  Hopefully this observation helps find an answer.