Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

blindeyetom wrote:

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Here's what happened: After installing 10.9 on my iMac the RAID (which I had named 12TB RAID) showed up with 2 partitions, one an EFI partition and the other named as MyBook. It was displaying the entire drive with it's 12TB capacity as blank. The fact that the drive mounted with 2 partitions and one of the partitions was named Mybook is strange, as that is Western Digital's designation and as I say, I have no WD software on my machine.

That really is odd and makes no logical sense unless there is some WD driver/software running. I can't imagine MacOS choosing that name. Anyway, is there a non-Mavericks machine available to you that you can attach the RAID array to? Heck, even rent a machine? Laptop? The suggestion to not rush into anything resembling rebuilding the RAID makes sense to me.

My sense tells me to connect the array to another machine less than 10.9 and see what's up.

Given that one of the topics of discussion here is back ups, and the fact that a lot of us (myself included) are not diligent enough in our manual back up routines, perhaps anyone using automated back up software (aside from Time Machine) could share with us any succesful, useful tools for automating the process.

For example, once I get it up and running and restore all the data from my backups and recover what I can from what I may have lost, what would be a good strategy for making backups of the 12TB array on which I archive all my photo files? Especially as I will be adding files to that archive almost daily. Currently my backups are a bunch of 2 TB disks with each one containing a variety of projects which I manually back up on. Ideally I'd like a solution that allows me make regular backups of the whole 12TB array in one go. If this can be an automated process that would save my a whole bunch of time. I work freelance and am the sole employee of my own business, so time is most definitely money in my case.

Rogerout, I since plugged the drive into a Macbook Pro running 10.8.5 where the drive showed up on the desktop as just the MyBook partition, again 12TB of free space. The EFI partition does not show up as mounted on the desktop. Running a quick scan on the drive with Data Recovery Software showed there is at least some data on the drive somewhere. Rather than go through the whole scan and recover process I cancelled the scan and ejected the drive.

Again, I never installed any WD software on my machines. As I say, I do use some WD drives (mostly portable ones which I erase and format using disk utility before doing anything else with them) so if somehow one of them installed some kind of software or device driver on my machine that may be causing the issue, I'd love to know how to go about finding and resolving that.

I'm having a similar issue with my G-Drive Mini. The drive is clearly full, as evidenced by the disk usage in the attached picture (it's a 1TB drive), but it shows 0 items and only displays labels. Every item in the drive are aperture libraries. When I plug this same drive into my other MacBook running ML, everything shows up like normal.

>blindeyetom

>I'd love to know how to go about finding and resolving that

Did you try the following folders for files with "WD", "WesternDigital" or "wdc" in their names?:

/Library/Application Support

/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchDaemons

/Library/Preferences

/System/Library/Extensions

/Library/StartupItems

I am not sure if WD's new uninstaller reports files that are found and removed:

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=124&sid=214&lang=en

I too am a photographer who lost 10 years of archive. My backup which has been working fine for the past two years is acting up now. It went for repairs. This has been the most expensive and painful OS update yet. What a nightmare!

No data loss after 2 weeks of OS 10.9 but I noticed my G-Drive Mini no longer works with my FW hub and USB hub. It now has to be plugged directly into my Mini in order to show up on the desktop. So I tried it with my Mac Pro and same deal: has to be plugged in directly. Oddly, my LaCie and OWC drives work fine with both FW and USB hubs. Of course, none of the FW drives will sleep but will if switched to USB.

blindeyetom wrote:

Currently my backups are a bunch of 2 TB disks with each one containing a variety of projects which I manually back up on. Ideally I'd like a solution that allows me make regular backups of the whole 12TB array in one go. If this can be an automated process that would save my a whole bunch of time.

Do you need the 12TB of data available online full time for transaction purposes or reference? You could use the RAID as an archive but in order to do that, it needs to be turned on only to copy data to it, then shut down until the next time. You don't want the drives running on an archive because spinning disks fail far more often than drives not spinning. I'd still want at least one more copy of the same data archived elsewhere.

12TB is a ton of data to manage and archive. If you don't need the RAID online full time, then you could modify your workflow so it supports a different approach to handling current, live data that is backed up on multiple drives while you're modifying it, then archiving it when the data or project becomes static, at which point the project data goes offline. My archives are hard disks sitting on a shelf here at home and a second set at my son's house. I also use Dropbox but that data is backed up with Time Machine.

Give me a few of days and I'll explain what I'm doing here. Hopefully others have some thoughts as well.

All – A potential external Hard drive repair for some of you.

My external hard drives started to reformat and disappear like everyone else, shortly after the Mavericks upgrade on my video production computer with 11 external drives totaling close to 40TB Half were files, and the other half of the drives were back ups. ( all gone with the My Book and EFI issues )

I’ve been waiting to experiment and try to fix them hoping someone would know more than I do and come up with a simple repair. I decided to stop waiting, and start fixing a few days ago.

Here is what I have found.

I’ve used several software recovery programs. It seems that Data Rescue 3 is the only one that can find the files with their filenames intact. The other’s I have tried, while not many , - only allowed me to save files that were generically named. ( not much help when you have thousands of video clips and pictures )

I used a different Mac that did not have Mavericks installed, I ran the Data Rescue program and selected Deep Scan. It came up that it would take 66 hours. I stopped the scan at 5 minutes , ( using the end early option ) and then looked at the drive through the program to see what files it found. On several of my drives it found the beginnings of all the files in their original directories! This was the first time I’ve seen a directory structure of any kind even after using the Kroll Data recovery program given to me by Western Digital.

I now have three of the Macs here in the office running deep scans using Data Rescue 3, and my hopes are more positive since this whole thing began.

I’ve got to get a dig in on Apple and WD for allowing this to happen to thousands of people that use their computers for business, and livelihood like I do. I’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars on equipment, and stuck with Final Cut Pro even when others left for Adobe. This should have never happened to us, nor should it again. This reminds me of the Microsoft days in the 90's.

AKabas thanks for that info. I looked through the directories listed and couldn't find any relevent files. I'll come back to this whole Mavericks/HD issue in a couple of days (weekends is family time plus I have a ton of other work demanding attention). I think I'll trawl through my machine looking for any WD files that might be there, though I think the issue goes beyond WD, as evidenced by other manufacturer's drives/enclosures etc having issues with Mavericks.

brobertson2 I'll take that into consideration as well. Glad you got yours working! Quick questions - is your machine still running Mavericks or did you roll back the OS? Is the drive RAID configured? If so what's the setup?

George Ford Yes it seems data recovery will work and that the files are likely to be there and recoverable, which fingers crossed is the case, and good news. I'm going to hold off running data recovery until a last resort. I'm waiting on Apple and OWC tech support to come back to me with their findings after I reported the issue to them. Both said they will investigate and get back to me within a few days. I'll chase them on Monday... Mainly I'd like to know how this happened in the first place..!

RogerOut Though a lot of the time I'm working on one project at a time, unfortunately yes, ideally I need to have the whole archive available as there are many instances where the work I'm doing involves working with files spread across multiple projects. I'm always looking for ways to improve my workflow though so reassessing how I catalogue the archive and store the data and access it is perhaps one of my tasks now. And yes 12TB is a ton of data, but not really when dealing wiht Photography (And the little video I do). A project - even just one day's shoot - can easliy run to 10s and even 100s of Gigabytes. Over time that adds up quick believe me.

Count me in :-(

Had Mavericks installed on day of release, but only now after a reboot of the MacBook Pro my WD 4TB connected via USB3 shows up empty....

George Ford

>On several of my drives it found the beginnings of all the files in their original directories!

When I try the same procedure, demo version of Data Rescue 3 finds files and gives them generic names and lists them in generic folders like Images, Movies, etc. No original name, no original directory.

Were your drives emptied and renamed to MyBook, too?

AKabas

Yes, - all of my drives appeared the same in they were mounting as a "My Book" with and additinal "EFI" reference. The drives that were affected were My book Studio drives connected Via USB and Firewire 800. My two G-Drives were also wiped out in the change. It seemed that as I rebooted mavericks several times, more drives appeared to be missing and renamed this way.

I'm noticing that not all of the drives being repaired have the original directory structure so the files are coming out generic in many cases. An example of this is my 3TB G-Drive and 1 TB G-Drive.

The issue with all of this is the amount of time to "deep scan" these drives with software which has been taking up to 60 hours to perform for the larger drives.

The 4TB Western Digital Studio drives are really showing a long time to Deep scan, if it's accurate in it's search estimate it may take up to 5 days to scan as these drives must be slower 5400RPM units.

blindeyetom wrote:

Though a lot of the time I'm working on one project at a time, unfortunately yes, ideally I need to have the whole archive available as there are many instances where the work I'm doing involves working with files spread across multiple projects. I'm always looking for ways to improve my workflow though so reassessing how I catalogue the archive and store the data and access it is perhaps one of my tasks now. And yes 12TB is a ton of data, but not really when dealing wiht Photography (And the little video I do). A project - even just one day's shoot - can easliy run to 10s and even 100s of Gigabytes. Over time that adds up quick believe me.

For sure, review the workflow and see if you can lighten the data load. I assume you're shooting RAW, so I'd look to deleting the images you know you'll never use before cataloging them. Only you know what will work for you. I'm involved, at times, with independent film making and I'm the guy who gets to wrangle the data off the camera, name and organize the files and folders, back it up (and archive it) then prep it for the editor. I feel your pain. I don't use any RAID drives. Instead I use lots of cheap hard drives and keep three copies of everything, which is in addition to what the editor has on the production machine.

That said, you will likely need to throw more money at this than you'd like. If you want 12TB online all the time, then you might need a second 12TB storage and backup (cloning) to that during the day. So you'd use one RAID as a production drive, the second for ongoing backups. That, if you want the backup to be identical to the production drive. You'd still need an archive routine of some sort.

If indentical is not important, then copy the data from the camera to the RAID, then to two other drives: The two drives function as duplicate backups until they're full, where one remains on-site (and off line) as a backup and the other goes off-site as an archive. Then you'd need two more drives to continue this routine. This the direction I'd be leaning.

Other archive options: Tape drive (yuk). A cloud service, which is worthy of serious consideration. I'd still perform and maintain local backups and use the cloud as the archive.

Hope this helps.

In relation to workflow and backups:

Basically how I work is to have the current work in progress on a drive (which is backed up) then once that project is completed it is transferred to the main archive, which contains everything (and which is backed up) and then save an edited selection to another archive (which is also backed up).

So for the project I am working on I always work from a separate drive (+ it's backup) dedicated to that project and only transfer it to the main archive once it's done. That in fact has saved my skin during this whole debacle as I had a current work in progress on that drive and it had not yet been transferred onto my archive, which was the drive that Mavericks messed with.

The problem was I had just set up that 12TB capacity RAID as a main archive this summer and had transferred my data from my previous archive to that. I still have my previous archive and it's backups spread across multiple drives but unfortunately I'd been so busy the past couple of months I'd not got round to setting up the new backup of the archive as transferred onto the 12TB RAID (which I should have done from the beginning), and which of course I have been working from. So there's a couple of months of work on that RAID array that Mavericks messed with that is not backed up anywhere. That's me being an idiot (setting up that backup was on my to do list, along with many other tasks...). I've just ordered what I need to backup the RAID array, which is my main production drive, once I get it sorted after this mess.

Basically this whole Mavericks incident has kicked me into making that task of sorting out the main production archive, the edited selects archive and the respective backups of them a priority, and reminded me why I shouldn't let my backup routine lapse.

Still, I'll say again I'm shocked that this issue was not picked up during beta testing of Mavericks. Especially as it seems to be more widespread and varied than just an issue with the WD software.

Before I attempt a data recovery on my drive, I will wait and see if Apple come up with a solution. A tech support guy told me they are working to the premise that the drive has not been formatted but that something - sorry if this is a bit vague - something is preventing the data showing up. In other words the data is there, the drive has not been reformatted, but the data is hidden and the drive is displaying as empty. That sounds promising but I'll take it with a pinch of salt. Though I was told that I may have to resort to data recovery, I was also told not to carry out that process just yet. At the moment I am willing to give Apple's engineers a bit of time to see if they can come up with a 'magic bullet' that will allow me to plug in the drives and reveal the hidden data. Assuming of course that that particular premise is correct.

For those going ahead with carrying out data recovery, I'm glad that seems to be working. Alongside Data Rescue 3 and EasyRecovery 11 Professional (for which it seems WD is giving out a license key to it's registered customers) there are a couple of methods I've had success with in the past. The following Testdisk and Photorec have both worked for me.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

And one I've not tried but some people swear by is DDrescue. http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/

Thanks to AKabas I found some WD software on my iMac I never knew existed. I never installed this, and it never showed up in a spotlight search but lo and behold there it was in:

/Library/Application Support (WDDriveManager)

/Library/LaunchDaemons (com.wdc.drivemanagerservice.plist)

I ran the WD uninstaller software - http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=124&sid=214&lang=en - and removed the uninstaller pref file which appeared in /Library/LaunchDaemons after running the uininstaller, (same procedure as that done by brobertson2.)

I restarted my machine and plugged in the RAID drive but it still shows up blank. (I uninstalled Mavericks so I'm back on Mountain Lion).

I'll pass the info on to Apple and OWC. At least now I think I know how my RAID drive - which is not Western Digital - got renamed with Western Digital's MyBook designation. Now I'll also be contacting Western Digital about why and how one of their drives put this software on my machine without my knowledge. I do have a few of their drives but I always reformat them wiht disk utility and never install their software!

Anyway, even after finding this Western Digital software and solving one mystery, I still have the mystery of why the drive still shows up as blank...