my hard drive won't be recognized after os x lion update!!!

I had the exact same problem. Lost my Cisco wifi too. Also effected QuickBooksPro - will no longer send emails unless you send them manually from the invoice itself. Hopefully there will be a patch for these things soon - very annoying that they didn't work out the bugs before releasing the OS.

gufetto wrote:

William Kucharski wrote:

Why not ask WD or LaCie?

Does Disk Utility see the drive(s)?

The problem is unequivocally generated by Lion. The reason should be asked to Apple, at first.

With the others OS pre Lion everything is good. We are talking about "standard" hard drive. There is something wrong in Lion.

Utility Disk see the drive but not repair it.

The problem is with Lion, but WD has to supply Apple with updated drivers for the new OS. Apple cannot be expected to produce drivers for every device out there - AFAIK the manufacturers are given notice and the development tools to make new drivers and these are included in the new release if supplied in time. WD had the exact same problem with their external drives not being recognized after the upgrade to Snow Leopard. Took a while before WD produced an update to fix the problem. Whenever you upgrade to a new OS (Mac or Windows) you have to check with manufacturers before assuming that the legacy products will still work. I've noticed this a lot with printers and scanners. My old scanner worked fine under Windows XP but not recognized under Vista or 7. The company (HP) decided not to produce an update for the drivers and this forced you to buy a new scanner that was compatible.

Sure you can get mad at Apple, but the responsibiliy really lies with Western Digital.

I have a possible fix! 🙂

My external hard drive was working until I updated it to Lion too. I found out that if you go to Spotlight/your Quick Search and type in "Disk Utility" and click on that, your external will then show there.

What you then do is click on your external hard drive and click on "Repair". It took me two times until it worked, so it may take a few times.

Good luck! 😀

Juliana

You must be one of the few lucky ones. First thing I did was run disk utility and it wasn't to be found! Western Digital has admitted that a number of drives do not support Lion. It's a case of waiting for them to pull their finger out.

A clean install of Snow Leopard later, I've everything back and working (much better than before) so I'll stick with this until Lion has had it's initial failings sorted.

LeeFoster wrote:

You must be one of the few lucky ones. First thing I did was run disk utility and it wasn't to be found! Western Digital has admitted that a number of drives do not support Lion. It's a case of waiting for them to pull their finger out.

A clean install of Snow Leopard later, I've everything back and working (much better than before) so I'll stick with this until Lion has had it's initial failings sorted.

So, if WD doesn't support Lion it's a failing of Lion?

How does that work?

From my point of view, Lion changed the way it communicated to external drives. It didn't warn people on the download site that some users may be affected by it - which it must have known would happen given the time it spent in development.

I bought a back up drive recommended by staff in the apple store (only 6 weeks before Lion). Spent ages backing everything up, used it as my iTunes source to relieve the stress and burdon on my small 250gb internal drive.

Installed Lion and gone! Everything I needed was on the back up drive with no way to access it other than downgrade.

So I do blame Apple to a certain degree. Why advise a customer to buy a drive that Lion doesn't support pending its imminent release? Apple have a responsibility to give customers confidence in their products and if they make changes that could potentially cause major disruption to their work flow, they have a duty to warn people, so when it does go wrong they cant then say "I didn't know".

Ive used Mac's for nearly 20 years, from System 7 on and I've stuck by them and defended some controversial choices they've made but sometimes they do f*** up. Just wish they admit it sooner rather than after weeks of complaints.

we are no longer users, now we are (beta) testers.

bitter truth and correct definition.

thanks WD and Apple. you work really well together.

First of all, the drive was sold to you for use with Snow Leopard; Apple Store employees see a new product for the first time when it's released.

Second, unless Apple or one of the beta testers was testing with that particular drive (which they obviously weren't, or the bug would have been found and reported earlier), Apple would expect standards-compliant drives to work. Many millions of drives from other vendors still do work, so that tells you something as well.

Finally, you backed up your drive while running Snow Leopard, but Lion couldn't see it but Snow Leopard still can (and thus a restore from that drive would still work.) That's the OS the drive was sold for.

In short, you're blaming Apple for something that is absolutely 0% their fault; they did nothing wrong.

If you want to blame someone, why not blame the makers of your drive, who as developers had access to Lion seeds for at least the last six months, so must have known themselves that their products wouldn't work with it, and did absolutely nothing to address it.

It's amazing that after using Macs for 20 years, you don't get the difference between Apple's and third party products; to use your experience it's like when a new version of Mac OS would come out and somethng like Quark Xpress wouldn't work properly; people would know not to install say System 9 until a new Xpress update came out to make it compatible with the new OS.

Are those of you seeing this seeing it with WD drives that have no special drivers or software, like the Essentials series drives, or only those with "WD Smartware" software?

William Kucharski wrote:

Are those of you seeing this seeing it with WD drives that have no special drivers or software, like the Essentials series drives, or only those with "WD Smartware" software?

for statistic I use no WD software. Never used. It is not necessary for detection and regular use as a usb or firewire HD.

I said to the people in the shop I was getting ready for the Lion upgrade so wanted to make room on my hard drive. So Apple does have a responsibility if they recommend products knowing what a customer intends for it. That is actually the LAW in the UK

It's also using the standard FireWire 800 port which has never posed a problem in the past and I dont use the WD software that came with it other than what was needed.

But some people have an Apple defensive attitude who wont see the company criticized for any reason. Apple could spray a turd silver and they'd all rush out and buy it thinking it was cool. Apple does screw up and make poor decisions. It's a company that makes electronic products at the end of the day - not a new religion that is beyond criticism.

I'm happy to have gone back to Snow Leopard. It all works fine and snappy. If other people have a problem with that, then get over it. Lion was nice and I'd have stuk with it if not for the extHDD, but it's not for me at this moment in time.

Yikes, I sure wish I'd seen this thread before I upgraded. My 1.5 TB WD Elements drive is not recognized by my new Lion upgrade either. Plugged in the USB, not through network, and via Tuxera NTFS (I'm not entirely sure what this does, but it seems critical).

From looking through this thread, it appears neither company is giving any definitive guidance on what to do, and neither has committed to releasing a fix in the immediate future. Is this correct?

• I just need it to work; I've got a ton of data I don't presently have access too. I don't care if WD, Apple, or both decide to fix it, but I do hope they fix it sometime yesterday.
• It does strike as unfortunate that Apple's upgrade install process didn't do some sort of a check for incompatibilities like this. I'd have postponed the upgrade.
• Yikes.

Any advice is welcome at this point.

thanks!

I wrote to WD the day I upgraded and lost my drive. They are aware of the issue and admitted they are not supporting Lion at present but a fix is in the works. It doesnt matter how it connects to the drive as it's a software issue, not hardware.

Dont upgrade until you can update your drive or between both companies they sort out the issue in a future update.

And after all, Snow Leopard is still fine and I'm not missing Lion. (that much)

I upgraded my version of Tuxera NTFS which seems to have resolved the issue, much to my surprise.

I've got the same issue with a Maxtor one touch 4 which I use for my time-machine backups. There is no trace of it on my mac since the upgrade. Tried a SMC and a PRAM reset which I read about in another forum but still no luck. I've found out since that Maxtor have been bought out by seagate and their website seems as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike. Please somebody help!!

Hmmm, Beta Testers indeed :/

Having the same problem with my external back up... Meh!

This should have been seen before Lion was let out of the cage.