The application Finder.app can't be opened.

Wilson,
That's not welcome news. Do you know what Alsoft says about this - if anything?

It's usually not enough to burn an update disk. You have to purchase an upgrade disk sInce the newer os has to be on the disk. That's what I had to do recently for my early 2008 MBP

WilsonLaidlaw wrote:
I would not put them bottom of the list, as I think that is firmly occupied by Western Digital's My Books (for Mac anyway - they may be fine on Windoze).
Wilson

Wilson, do you think that goes for WD internal range of hard drives as well? ( Caviar Blacks?).. If that is the case then you have got me worried and that must mean that the Mac hardware is now as flaky as Snow Leopard.

My Mac pro Workstation (Early 2009) came with a 500Gb WD Caviar Black as its main Mac factory HDD.
When I put in 3 x 1TB hard drives in the spare slots last year I used WD Caviar Black's as well.

I am about to pull the 500 GB boot drive out and was thinking of replacing with a WD Caviar Black 2TB drive, or maybe using one of the existing 1TB drives, and put the new 2TB drive in as the Time machine volume.

Should I perhaps go for a brand other than the WD Caviar Black? if so what do you feel is a beter quality drive

Thanks for perhaps saving me from a big mistake

Neil

I bought my Disk Warrior (V4.1) during the currency of Leopard. According to their website, you get a free upgrade to Snow Leopard compatibility. If you have to buy an upgrade every time Apple upgrades their OS, that is a bit of a rip off. I have emailed AlSoft last night and I will wait to see what their answer says.

Wilson

I think the internal WD drives are just fine. It is their external housings that don't seem to work well with Mac. In particular, the sleep/wake up seems to give them problems, after you have reformatted as Mac OS Extended/Journaled, either AFS or GUID. Now you can leave the drive as FAT32 but that does not sit terribly well with Mac.

Wilson

Thanks for the quick reply Wilson, laid my mind to rest a bit.
My machine tends to stay on 24/7 so that is good to hear

Neil

Hi Wilson,

Do those criticism apply to all of the WD external drives, including the Elements range? What exactly are the problems with sleep?

I'd been considering buying one of those for a Time Machine backup drive, and do put my Mac to sleep every night (or when it's not in use) so problems with sleep could be a deal breaker for me.

feel free to answer by private message if you think this is getting a bit off topic for the thread 🙂

Phil

Phil,

There does not seem to be a private message facility on this forum unlike most forums (foramina??). However since it is not totally OTT, I feel I can post on here. The problems I have had all related to WD MY Books. Firstly they were horribly unreliable and I have two replacements for one of the My Books I bought and one for the other one - there was a special offer to buy one and get another at 50% off on Amazon France. I was getting finder crashes on them even before Slow Leopard and they were completely unusable on SL. I have now given one to my son to use on his Windoze Laptop and I keep a spare set of all downloaded programs on the other and only plug it when needed. They would crash any SL machine on wake up every time. Even on Leopard machines, when the computer was asleep, you could sometimes hear the My Book whirring away by itself. It would also wake my iMac up from sleep in the middle of the night, when it was plugged in to my Time Capsule. As both in the UK and in France, the iMac sits in my bedroom, this is pretty unwelcome.

Wilson

Hi Wilson,

Thanks for the response. I've had a number of WD internal drives over the years with no problems at all. But if the external ones cause crashes when the Mac comes out of sleep then it's a definite deal breaker for me. I'm glad I found that out before buying one.

I notice WD have a specific Mac range of external drives. Perhaps this is why. They do seem more expensive though, and don't include the Elements range. I don't need fancy flashing lights on the front of the drive, just a reliable backup drive.

Once again thanks,
Phil

Phil,

I suspect that there is nothing to choose between Freecom (especially the Datatanks), iOmega and Buffalo. My experience with Freecom's first class, out of warranty, ex-gratia free repair, would be the deciding factor for me. other than an extreme portable drive, where I think the iOmega FW800 eGo is the bee's knees.

Wilson

How can this issue still exist??? NOTHING has been done to fix this. Its still a problem with 10.6.3, as noted by many others here. Its obviously not isolated to particular hardware or software combinations, as everything under the sun has been given in this thread as examples.

Dammit, Apple fix this problem already. Its a disaster. We have a 33-page thread complaining about it here. I'm about ready to revert to 10.5.

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2407057&tstart=0

Guys, did you try this? At least, it worked to me. Now I am free from Finder crush!

Hey all,

Not sure if this will help anyone else, but it fixed my wife's macbook that was experiencing the same issue. It started when she had some trouble un-mounting a usb camera, as well as a WD external firewire HD used for time machine backups.

Her computer was basically unusable. The finder would lock up and become unresponsive to anything but a hard reboot. Sometime immediately, sometimes after a few minutes, all with the finder error 10810.

I tried all the usual tricks, different user account, ran the 10.6.3 standalone updater, disk utility, disk warrior, safe mode, FW target disk mode, pref's, etc.. I looked at her logs via the terminal and console, and noted similar log reports which others reported seeing - until her computer would ultimately hang again. I read through all 33 pages of posts looking for an answer, as well as some other discussions and google searches.

Nothing worked until I combined a few posts I found on the issue and came up with the following command via the terminal.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LaunchSe rvices.framework/Versions/A/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

Her computer has been fine for a few weeks now. No issues, and nothing in the logs. She's mounted and unmounted the camera and external HD without incident numerous times too. Hope this may help someone else. Cheers.

Just applied the 10.6.4 update, reset my airport extreme firmware to 7.4.2, and ran a time machine backup. Time machine could not find the external drive connected to the airport extreme. Downgraded to 7.4.1 and backup works fine, connects the external drive automatically.

So far after the 10.6.3 update I have not had one finder error. But the connect to external drive for Time Machine backups is still an ABSE 7.4.2 firmware bug.

I see a lot of head-scratching here about Western Digital external drives.

FWIW, you may find *this explanation of why* an interesting read. Note the part where it says

"intensive use of Western Digital hard drives can cause them to stop responding"

http://help.bombich.com/discussions/problems/142-do-not-use-a-western-digital-dr ive