Alias failure for WD My Book Firewire Backup Drive

If this was simply a matter of my WD not working correctly, I'd say yes, it is purely a WD issue. And WD has admitted they have an issue with 10.6 and are working to fix it, just as Canon is and I would guess, HP and Epson and others are. But lots of other peripherals are also not working for lots of other folks under firewire. When it comes to firewire, something basic seems to be affecting many peoples' ability to use it to connect with, now, in 10.6. Mr. Apple Genius said as much when my external burner would not work at the Apple Store I took it to. Did every outside vendor's chipsets and firmwares suddenly became unstable under 10.6 because they are all faulty or was 10.6 too big a change for any of them to handle due to Apple's not paying attention to external connections and their needs? My vote is against Apple. All they had to do was plug in peripherals and see if they were working during beta testing of 10.6. If you are saying that Apple had no need to do that, then we have a difference of opinion.

As to my use of the WD, I very clearly stated that it booted fine in 10.5 (I didn't change over to 10.5 until .1 or .2). It ran fine in 10.6. After a day with 10.6 on my machine, I backed-up my new 10.6 install over my (previous) 10.5 install on the WD. THEN I discovered it would not boot, that System Preferences>Startup Disc didn't even see it. Nothing to do with pram. And clearly not limited to WD, as so many other things are also not working. Common sense tells me that the WD has an issue. My external burner ALSO having an issue makes this a more global problem. I'm neither a fanboy nor an Apple hater. Just a long-time user with enough knowledge to know when something gets messed up and Apple caused it. I've been with OS X since 10.0.3, I've seen the good and the bad and the stupid. In the past, many vendors didn't change quick enough to keep up with the OS, because it was so new. Now, it's not new, vendors are fairly savvy, and upgrades are taken care of. Apple makes mistakes, too. Let's be big enough to admit it.

Hi Dude,

I am left a bit confused; it seems that you are saying that you both can and cannot boot from an external WD drive running 10.6:

+As to my use of the WD, I very clearly stated that it booted fine in 10.5 (I didn't change over to 10.5 until .1 or .2). *It ran fine in 10.6.* After a day with 10.6 on my machine, I backed-up my new 10.6 install over my (previous) 10.5 install on the WD. *THEN I discovered it would not boot*, that System Preferences>Startup Disc didn't even see it. Nothing to do with pram.+

...or am I misunderstanding?

OK folks, let's work on our reading skills. Running fine means running fine. It opens, I can see it, I can move info back and forth, etc. How often do YOU boot off your external. I do it once in a great while, if I want to run a utility or back-up to a working install if my OS has issues. Boot up means precisely that. I select it as a startup disc and let it start up. It BOOTS my machine externally. If that is confusing, go to System Preferences>Startup Disc and see what is there (as I referenced in my post).

dechamp wrote:

If an external drive booted before installing Snow Leopard, then it will still boot after installing Snow Leopard to a different drive.

Do I understand correctly: I can currently boot from either of 2 full backups (WD My Book via FirWire) with 10.5.8. If I update these backups to reflect my current MacHD running 10.6... I should experience no difficulty? At this juncture I'm left very uncertain as others have said that this doesn't work (or, at least, it didn't for some).

Again, read MY posts about MY issues, not someone else's interpretation of them. My WD DID boot as an external startup HD in 10.5. It DOES NOT DO SO in 10.6. If you upgrade your machine to 10.6, and your experience is like mine, YOUR MACHINE WILL NOT BOOT UP OFF OF THE WD HD. Can you use the HD? I can. Can you transfer info either direction? I can. Can you back-up your machine to it using SuperDuper? I can. Can you select your WD HD in System Preferences>Startup Disc and start up your machine using the WD? I cannot.

The issue of portable WD drives not booting from FW existed prior to 10.6, there are may posts all over the net on this subject. The WD drive on my MBP will not boot from FW, but will boot from usb every time. I had this condition under 10.5 and it is unchanged under 10.6. In any event, I normally use FW for my SuperDuper updates but have to connect it by usb if I need to use it as a boot drive. I didn't find a clear answer to the cause of this issue.

Sorry, your posts have had so much information inconsistencies that it has become a little difficult keeping the chain of events clean and on track. Now that I know that you actually have 10.6 on the external drive I'm sure that you are right in that the problem was caused by 10.6

The same thing happened to Western Digital drives when 10.5 came out. It's still a firmware issue with Western Digital. Many other hard drive manufacturers have not had a problem with external FW drives with either OS. All of mine work fine. From this, and the fact that WD has already proven that they don't do well with FW firmware implementations, I've again lowered my estimation on WD MyBook drives and will continue to counsel my clients to avoid that product.

The statement that "lots of other peripherals are also not working for lots of other folks under firewire" doesn't change your WD problem at all. I'm sure that other manufacturers have also cut corners. SL can not keep high performance and reliability with just part of the firewire protocol working, sort of. Windows does that, and those machines suffer the performance issues that kill a machine. Many other manufacturers of FW hard drives have not had any issues with Leopard, and now Snow Leopard.

All they had to do was plug in peripherals and see if they were working during beta testing of 10.6. If you are saying that Apple had no need to do that, then we have a difference of opinion.

I'm not saying that Apple had no need to do that. I did say that it doesn't matter if the drive doesn't work. If there is a firmware issue due to not fully implementing a protocol (especially when other companies have), then the drive is not suitable for Snow Leopard at all, and hardware that is not reliable has no place on this OS.

I have no idea what's causing your problem with the external firewire burner. Both of mine work well. I have several of them due to internal optical drives going south during Tiger and Leopard.

Did every outside vendor's chipsets and firmwares suddenly became unstable under 10.6 because they are all faulty or was 10.6 too big a change for any of them to handle due to Apple's not paying attention to external connections and their needs?

No

My vote is against Apple.

There are millions of successful installations, with various hardware's that render your 'vote' meaningless.

Meanwhile, while you have a laundry list of complaints you never said (AFAIK) what brand and model of external burner you are trying to use. That would be very interesting, as if the firmware is the problem and is related to a sloppy error correction routine in firewire I'd like to know what equipment to dodge. WD and Buffalo are already established as flakey, what others?

I assume your reference to Canon, HP, and Epson is related to printer/scanner driver issues. Are you also having these issues, or just bulking up your list?

Apple makes mistakes, too. Let's be big enough to admit it.

This has always been true. There are many examples of changes they've had to make by releasing system updates. The most recent being the problems relating to wireless connections while on battery power. They have admitted that they caused the problem, and they will fix it. This has nothing at all to do with firewire drives, or the Buffalo USB drives that don't work well. The subject of this thread is specific to firewire drives, and listing all of the other kinds of problems does not support your vote and only creates confusion.

If you keep on track we may be able to help or fully understand a particular issue. As for me, I'm happy my firewire peripherals are working well with SL. If they didn't I'd change them for better quality components or revert to a less picky OS, like Leopard or Windows. I wouldn't want to try to make a less than perfect firmware work in a high performance environment. The data is too precious.

The Dude Abides wrote:
OK folks, let's work on our reading skills. Running fine means running fine. It opens, I can see it, I can move info back and forth, etc. How often do YOU boot off your external. I do it once in a great while, if I want to run a utility or back-up to a working install if my OS has issues. Boot up means precisely that. I select it as a startup disc and let it start up. It BOOTS my machine externally. If that is confusing, go to System Preferences>Startup Disc and see what is there (as I referenced in my post).

I apologize if my comment proved irritating to you.

But when you say that it would boot fine from an external drive running 10.5... I understand that you were able to run 10.5 normally when booted from the external WD drive.

Following this, you state that 10.6 was also fine. Normally, one would understand that you found that you were able to boot and operate your Mac from a 10.6 update.

But from your response (above), lack of clarity obliges me to suspect that you were only saying that the 10.6 backup appeared fine... but that it would not boot.

I feel that your question: *How often do YOU boot off your external?* is not pertinent. But, the answer is that I do boot quite frequently from my backups just to be assured that they are functional.

<Sigh> Type in "Firewire" in the 10.6 forum search and you will find plenty about this/these issues (including my discussion about my burner).

I'm sorry if you do not follow when I say "boot" vs. "use." Starting up my machine using the OS on an external is how I use the term "boot," as in "bootable disc." Turning on an external and using it is not the same, at least to me.

Yes, the WD "appeared" fine, as it did all the things it normally did. Until I tried to "boot" it.

No, I'm not really irritated at you, nkh, as, if you and I were talking, we could make sure we understood each other. But you were referencing someone else who interjected into our discussion, and that confused things.

I thought all of my posts were quite clear. If WDs had issues before, under 10.5, then they did. If someone thinks it's all the vendor's fault that firewire now seems to have a number of problems it didn't before, that's their opinion. Just as it is mine that this problem seems a bit global and is not entirely the vendor's fault.

I didn't reference my burner because there is already a thread elsewhere for that (see my first sentence, above).

I have had direct contact with Apple (phone and personal visit) and they seem to be saying that there is a problem with what they did insofar as how people's peripherals are reacting to 10.6.

I have had conversations with vendors who are working to correct things on their end.

All of these devices work with USB. They do not with firewire. That is interesting, and points to firewire as the issue. Apple's fault or vendors? Both? Apple released this software, they should have done some due diligence before doing so. this OS is far along now, everyone should be on the same page.

Oh, and I do not have a "laundry list" of problems. One thing, firewire, is not anywhere near a laundry list.

Every time a new iteration comes out, some things work and some don't. Apple and vendors rush to fix things. This time, firewire (in my opinion) is not working well. If someone else thinks it is, that's their opinion. We have a difference of opinion. But there IS a problem, and my guess is Apple will fix it with 10.6.1. At that time, let's meet here again. In the meantime, I'm outta this discussion. bye.

Do I understand correctly: I can currently boot from either of 2 full backups (WD My Book via FirWire) with 10.5.8. If I update these backups to reflect my current MacHD running 10.6... I should experience no difficulty? At this juncture I'm left very uncertain as others have said that this doesn't work (or, at least, it didn't for some).

Apparently you could have a problem booting from 10.6 on a WD external firewire drive (USB probably works though). This will probably be fixed with yet another firmware update from Western Digital. 10.5.8 doesn't appear to push the firmware too much for it to handle.

If you have 10.5.8 on one drive, 10.6 on another, and in the case of my MBP which came with Tiger, 10.4 on yet another drive, you will be able to boot from any of the drives, unless there is a firmware issue with the drive manufacturer, Western Digital MyBook drives for example, that doesn't work with the OS you are trying to boot from.

Restated, in general, an Intel Mac can boot from any OS that was current when it was made, and every OS released since it was made. The latest Macs can not boot from an OS that was not current when it was made. My latest iMac can boot from Leopard and Snow Leopard, but it can not boot from a Tiger drive. To take it a step farther, if your Mac came with 10.5.4 or some other version, it will not boot from 10.5.3 so even the OS sub-version can be important (this is especially true for many Mac Pro's that came with upgraded video cards from Apple). Buffalo drives with USB started to fail with the 10.5.7 update.

For me, booting from external firewire and USB drives works perfectly fine with all three OS's on a couple of Mac's, and with both Leopard and Snow Leopard on the last 2 machines I got this year. My external drives are apparently fully compatible with the entire firewire or USB protocol, and will be fast and reliable with very few errors. None of my drives are made by Western Digital or Buffalo.

In addition, my external optical drives were made by EZQuest and have FW400 ports. These are working well with Snow Leopard also. I have another generic FW/USB case with a cheap Sony optical drive in it. It also seems to be working well, but I can't check the chipset as it's on loan to a client who is also running Snow Leopard. I bought the cheap external closure so that I could reinstall Windows on machines I get with bad optical drives.

No use beating around the bush any longer. Western Digital MyBook drives from Costco are discount purchases. If they work, great. If they don't, chuck'em or wait for repairs from WD. Snow Leopard will not put up with less than optimum hardware. All cylinders have to fire for it to work properly.

Thanks for the tip, unchecking te alias bit worked fine for me as well.

Had the same problem as many of you: After installing Snow Leopard 10.6 several folders on external drives failed to open. When the folder(s) were double clicked it would not open, instead a message would state the folder is an unlinked alias (even though it would indicate a proportionate files size).

CAUSE: I discussed this problem with Jason at Apple. After he did extensive investigating, found the problem to the problem folder's "Alias Bit" was turned on.

SOLUTION (at least in this case):
— Go to http://cocoatech.com/ and download their "Path Finder" application.
— After downloading it, install it and open the application.
— This is a paid application but they do allow a 30 day trial. Select the trial.
— Navigate to the folder(s) that are a problem.
— Select (highlight) the problem folder and select "Get Info" (Right-Click or Control-Click if you don't have the "Info" icon on your menu bar).
— Below the label color bars in the "INFO" you'll see a list of check box options.
— Second from the bottom is "Alias Bits".
— Unchecked (turn off) "Alias Bits".
— Go to your Finder Desktop and confirm by opening the problem folder.
You should now be all set.

If you'd like to thank Jason, let Apple know at:
http://www.apple.com/support/feedback/

Hope this helps.

Gary

Earlier this year, I returned a WD MyBook Studio edition drive because it turned out not to support booting. This was under Leopard. Have you ever been able to boot from your WD external?

Actually... this is for all who have posted in this thread which is filled with views on the suitability (or not) of WD drives serving as full backups via FireWire.

I "bit the bullet" today and installed an OS X 10.6 backup on a WD My Book Studio.

It booted successfully!

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2147878&tstart=0

Sarance your a life saver... I too use pathfinder and tried your solution and it worked fine... Your the greatest... Thanks bud.