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

Hey, I just updated my MacBook Pro 13" to OS X Lion today, and now my WD Elements External Hard Drive will not be read by my Mac at all anymore. Is there gonna be a software update on my hard drive's end that will become compatible with Lion eventually, or am I screwed? Has this happened to anyone also, or do I need to go with another hard drive manufacturer....help plz!!!!

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7)

Posted on Jul 22, 2011 5:22 PM

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67 replies

Jul 28, 2011 8:44 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

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.

Jul 28, 2011 8:58 AM in response to jackiefrombrooklyn

I own two of the Western Digital 2TB Elements (WDBAAU0020HBK) and have the same problem. The hard drives show up in Disk Utility, but that doesn't matter if they can't be accessed through Finder.


After unsuccessfully trying to scan and repair them I have been searching through the Western Digital Forums and it seems like Western Digital is well aware of the problem and currently working to fix the incompatibilities with Lion and their products. Since the operating system was recently released it is not officially supported just yet. We will need to wait until they release a compatibility patch. (Source)


I'm a little taken aback, that this is a known issue that hasn't been fixed before the release of Lion. Especially since it wasn't the first time Western Digital has experienced problems with a new Mac OS.


The source of the trouble is unknown to me but, it is known that apparently Apple has changed the AFP (Apple File Protocol), because they deemed it "not secure enough". (Source) This only concerns the NAS (Network Attached Storage) products of course, though there's most likely more changes to the file handling where that came from. So it's possibly up to Apple to come up with a solution.


Anyway, that's all I could find about this issue for now.

Jul 28, 2011 9:12 AM in response to Deuxtan

Changes in AFP wouldn't result in Disk Utlity not being able to see the device; if that's the case it's obviously an issue where the USB firmware in the WD enclosures isn't properly following the protocol. However, if Disk Utility can see it but not mount it, it still points to a USB issue as the drive doesn't care whether a Mac OS, NTFS, FAT or UNIX file system is on it, it knows not about file systems, just data transfers.


If it was a pure Lion bug it would be seen across more enclosures, but at present it seems to be mostly WD with a few LaCie drives in the mix as well.

Jul 28, 2011 9:17 AM in response to gufetto

gufetto wrote:

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


I've had to pull out this example before:


Say there's a firmware bug on the device where it calculates "3 + 2" as "5" but "2 + 3" as "6."


If every other device on the planet adds "3 + 2" but Lion adds "2 + 3," it's not Apple's responsibility to change their code to add "3 + 2" nor should they.


Issues with firmware with external enclosures have cropped up before with previous versions of Mac OS X, and in each case it was the enclosure and/or bridge chip vendor that had to produce a fix.


Ironically (or perhaps not) WD in particular has needed to develop fixes on multiple occasions when a new release of Mac OS X had problems talking to their drives. (Note WD, not Apple.)

Jul 28, 2011 9:55 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

William Kucharski wrote:


gufetto wrote:

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


I've had to pull out this example before:


Say there's a firmware bug on the device where it calculates "3 + 2" as "5" but "2 + 3" as "6."


If every other device on the planet adds "3 + 2" but Lion adds "2 + 3," it's not Apple's responsibility to change their code to add "3 + 2" nor should they.


Issues with firmware with external enclosures have cropped up before with previous versions of Mac OS X, and in each case it was the enclosure and/or bridge chip vendor that had to produce a fix.


Ironically (or perhaps not) WD in particular has needed to develop fixes on multiple occasions when a new release of Mac OS X had problems talking to their drives. (Note WD, not Apple.)


Compatibility must remain if we are speaking of a modern OS. The disk is 2 years old. The drivers (USB and firewire) are substantially apple. I not talking about AFP or SMB or somothing else. A normal connection with cable: hard drive to Mac. My WD HD works with every OS. Only Lion fails. Too easy invoking a vendor fix. There is something wrong in this hasty new OS.


Finally I don't remember those multiple occasions in which WD has developed fixes about this kind of HD.

Jul 28, 2011 9:08 PM in response to gufetto

If it were the OS the same issue would affect every vendor's hard drive and there would be hundreds of posts about how users' Seagate, LaCie, Granite Digital and other enclosures had gone missing; instead there have been complaints about one particular LaCie enclosure and WD enclosures.


Re-read my example to see why this may be and why Apple would not be at fault if that's what's happening.


A nasty issue happened back in Mac OS X 10.3 Panther where a bug in the firmware of external enclosures used for several third party external drives caused data loss. Apple made some changes to minimize the odds of this occurring, but the issue still could occur unless the firmware in the enclosures was patched.

Jul 29, 2011 10:36 AM in response to jackiefrombrooklyn

I have the same problem here with my MacBook Air 13" (late 2010). I have a 1.5TB WD External Hard Drive that I bought at the same time as the Air. I installed Lion last week and as far as I could tell, the hard drive was working fine and showing up on my desktop (one partition as Time Capsule, two separate partitions for storage). Last night, when I turned on the Air, it would not recognize or mount the WD and in disk utility, it only gave me the option of erasing the whole drive, which I'm not about to do with 12 years of data on that drive.


First the wifi connection drops, now this. WD and Apple need to get on this, but if WD gets an update to its firmware, how am I supposed to load it if Lion doesn't recognize the drive?


-John

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

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