Alias failure for WD My Book Firewire Backup Drive

Same problem. Repairing permissions does not help.

Patfinder and unchecking the alias bit (whatever it's for) fixed the problems with my Drobo.
Thanks Sarance!

After I installed Snow Leopard I decided to start using Time Machine. I bought a WD My Book Studio Edition 1TB external drive from the Apple Store. My iMac wouldn't see the drive (using Firewire). The WD tech had me unplug/restart/plug in, etc. and finally it saw it. Time Machine worked ok for a few days then again the computer wouldn't see the drive. Called Apple and the tech had me erase & reformat the drive even though it was supposedly formatted for the Mac. The drive has worked fine since then.

As long as my WD 500 is plugged directly into a FW 400 port, it is recognized. I can do backups, access info, etc. HOWEVER, I tried booting from it last night and Startup Disc didn't even see it. Unless I go out and buy another drive, migrate all the info to it, then re-format the original as per above, and re-migrate back, I can't boot from my external drive in an emergency. (If that would even work in my case.) I can only hope that 10.6.1 has fixes for the FW issue so many of us are having (with external burners and printers as well). Did no engineer at Apple plug in a FW device to check compatibility before putting these changes of architecture into place?

Thanks Sarance! I'm a massive fan.

Hi, now also probs with a Seagate USB drive. Always when I drop data on the drive the Alias fails. When I make a fresh format no problems. Sorry but that it. I will switch back today to 10.5. Data are to important to accept this massive error from Apple in 10.6. So hope on 10.6.1 or USB Drive fail Update 1.0. 😉

Did no engineer at Apple plug in a FW device to check compatibility before putting these changes of architecture into place?

I'm not an Apple Engineer (or affiliated in any other way), and don't know what they used to test SL with. It wouldn't have mattered if they did try WD drives and they failed again to work properly with firewire.

None of the FW problems with Western Digital drives were fixed by Apple when many models of these drives failed to work properly after 10.5 was released.

Hundreds of testers used their existing Macs with firewire external drives on 10.6. I used 3 different drives - a generic case made by Acomdata, and two different OWC MiniStack V3's. I restored the installer disk for SL to partitions on the external drives and used them to install SL to a MBP with a bad DVD drive (drive failed a week after 10.5 was released a couple of years ago). I used this system for many months and the drives never failed to work and be available to boot and install from.

I don't own any of the WD drives. They had problems with FW the day 10.5 was released and many of them have firmware updates you might be able to download. I've updated several of the WD MyBook series drives that clients have purchased at Costco. I charged for my time, so I don't think they saved much on the Costco bargain.

The MiniStack and Mercury Elite drives at OWC - http://www.macsales.com will all work with Apple products. OWC's record of compatibility, performance, and support is impressive. Hopefully WD will get around to fixing your issue with another firmware update, unless they already have one and you haven't installed it yet.

Good luck with that.

Message was edited by: dechamp

All,

Hopefully WD will get around to fixing your issue with another firmware update, unless they already have one and you haven't installed it yet.

They do have one, and it has been working just fine for me. It is, however, dated from January (I think) of this year, so there may be yet another in the offing.

Scott

I spoke to them this a.m., they admitted there are problems, and that they will be updating firmware in the future. "Check the website in a while" is what I got. Weeks, months, who knows? but they did admit to problems. As it stands now, I can save to the external, retrieve from the external but not boot from the external (MyBook Home Edition 500 USB/FW/SATA).

Thank you. Your tip worked for me as well.

Any idea what the alias bit does? I suspect it has something to do with enabling general permissionless access for external drives. I had to manually enable everyone to have read/write access after turning off the bit.

Too bad I didn’t learn about this fix before Snow Leopard mangled the Time Machine sparse diskimage residing on the drive. Now I’ll have to start from scratch. Disk Utility cannot repair it.

Thanks for confirming my fears with information from the vendor. I got a couple of those MyBook drives working for Firewire based Time Machine backup drives when Leopard first came out by using the firmware updates that quickly became available.

Western Digital did respond quickly with the last problems and if they respond quickly again then maybe I'll move them up a notch or so on my list.

Buffalo USB drive problems that started with 10.5.7 are still on the bottom, as they have been for several years. Last I heard, they were saying that no matter what the box said or didn't say, they don't or didn't support Mac's. Now it's really not a matter of supporting Mac's or any other brand of computer. It's a matter of not cutting corners or not fully implementing a protocol. These designs have been around for years and shouldn't really be a mystery to design engineers.

I have 2 WD FW drives (My Book Premium; My Book Studio) with each holding a SuperDuper full backup of OS X 10.5.8. I've had no problem booting from either drives. However, I've removed WDDriveManager from MacHD as it appeared incompatible with OS X 10.6; the app would write a message to Console every 10 seconds --- no other negative aspects of the DriveManager apart from this continual updating on Console.

I've not as yet used SuperDuper to update my WD backups to OS X 10.6; the 10.5.8 updates continue to work (i.e. I can boot from them).

What is the current advice with respect to updating these backup volumes to 10.6? Are the problems noted above discussed in greater detail elsewhere --- hopefully with good advice?

MyBook Home Edition 500- Never had any trouble connecting, never had any trouble moving info, SuperDuper backed-up perfectly once I had 10.6 on my iMac. HOWEVER, it will not let me boot from it now. So, all works well except I can't boot in case of an emergency to restore from the backup on it. WD says it's a problem, they know about it, and they are working on it. I should watch their web site for an update "in the future." Oh, and they gave me a $15 gift coupon if I spend $100+ at their on-line store. Whoopee!

This comes from Apple diddling with the FireWire architecture in some way. They (at least the Apple Genius I saw) admit it. They are for sure hearing about it, as a myriad of externals have issues with FW. We can only hope that 10.6.1 fixes things.

If I'd realized that I couldn't boot, I never would have backed-up my machine onto the external, and instead would have put 10.5 back on until Apple got their act together. Unfortunately, all seemed fine, so I did and now I'm stuck until. Their are workarounds for my scanner and my external burner, but the HD is useless as a bootable back-up until or if.

Thanks. You've confirmed my suspicions. I think I'll just leave 10.5.8 SuperDuper backups on the WD drives until it looks like the problem is addressed.

This comes from Apple diddling with the FireWire architecture in some way. They (at least the Apple Genius I saw) admit it. They are for sure hearing about it, as a myriad of externals have issues with FW. We can only hope that 10.6.1 fixes things.

So let me get this straight, You are trying to boot a machine with an external FW drive with OS 10.5 on it. This drive is supposed to come up in the boot options and be available for your machine to use. The boot options appear before any OS - 10.5 or 10.6 has come up and you are blaming the problem on an installation of 10.6 which isn't even running when you have the problem.

Now baring a firmware update to your machine by Apple to change the capability of the motherboard's firmware chips, how could 10.6 possibly affect the external drive's ability to boot a Mac?

Common sense should tell you that you are looking at some of the WD firewire firmware issues that became apparent when 10.5 was released.

Your "Apple Genius" is either mistaken, or you have corrupted some part of what was said. Snow Leopard did not change the firmware for firewire on your motherboard. If an external drive booted before installing Snow Leopard, then it will still boot after installing Snow Leopard to a different drive.

Have you tried Zapping The Pram?
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1379