Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Giles Roditi wrote:

First drive to show a problem was an external FirWire Seagate FreeAgent Pro w

Meanwhile my External LaCie Porshe Design hard drives (USB) are playing up,

However, I notice that my iMac

Define "playing up" does this refer to 'acting up' or not working correctly. (English, but different English 😊)

Do you have a Mac pro or otherwise to test the Seagate FW drive on, either running Mavericks or not?

You give no indication any of your HD are corrupted or re-partitioned.

Most reports of these FW/ cant-mount occurances appear to be happening on Imacs, for what reasons are indeterminate by anyone or clue to same,....yet.

Sorry I have none to test for you, I have an older Imac running Mavericks to experiment with and 100 hard drives, but none are firewire enclosured.

Do you have a conventional standard USB 3.0 or 2.0 HD to connect and use?

WDC WD6400AAKS refers to this drive:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136218

I assume you either have a much older (must be) Imac or have a replacement HD installed. No worries about any internal HD inside your Imac, none at all.

Giles Roditi wrote:

I have checked for any Western Digital software (which I should not have anyway as I have never bought one of their drives) and not found anything including using sudo in Terminal as suggested in recent post to this thread. However, I notice that my iMac has its Macintosh HD showing as being a WDC WD6400AAKS-40h2B0 - presumably a Western Digital drive ?

Anyone have any hints as to what is going on and what I should do as recent 10.9.1 update has made no difference and External LaCie drive has gone offline again today - I am getting increasingly worried.

Your issue sounds like the 'long fsck' corruption, which may not be related to the WD software. Possibly number 4 of this post by PlotinusVeritas

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475136?answerId=24164207022#24164207022

GetRealBro has been wokring on this so seek out his posts here, it may give you other logs to look for etc.

Personally I'd be looking at ways to revert to an earlier OS or at least creating a bootable 10.8 or earlier system to see if the disks read OK in that OS, it's unclear if there are bugs in 10.9's fsck_hfs, Disk Utility or something else.

Drew Reece wrote:

...
Personally I'd be looking at ways to revert to an earlier OS or at least creating a bootable 10.8 or earlier system to see if the disks read OK in that OS, it's unclear if there are bugs in 10.9's fsck_hfs, Disk Utility or something else.

I agree. For those who do not have a bootable partition of 10.6.8, 10.7 or 10.8 on a hard drive...

It is quite easy (but unfortunately also very slow) to build a bootable USB Stick (16 or 32GB) with a fully functional clean install of an older (i.e. very stable) version of OSX (e.g. Snow Leopard 10.6.8). This gives you a clean OSX, with no WD stuff or any other excuses, that will allow back up of data, etc. I've done it, it works.

This bootable USB Stick also allows the verification of the degree of "damage" that may (or may not) have happened to drives which fail to mount in 10.9. This is particularly effective if the drive is not mounting because of the "long fsck" issue.... But don't be in a hurry when trying to mount the drive, even in an older version of OSX. If the FileSystem is "dirty", even 10.6.8 will run a "long fsck" before mounting the drive and providing full access to the data. Wait at least 10 min. and maybe longer if it is a large (3-4T) drive or has a complicated file structure (e.g. Time Machine). In this game patience is a serious virtue.

---GetRealBro

I have iMac with Mavericks. When I updated to Mavericks a few weeks ago my LaCie drive suddenly became "full" and Time Machine basically stopped suggesting not enough space on hard drive. That drive was partitioned for TM on one side and most of my photos on the other side of the partition. When I started reading about some of these problems and horror stories I diconnected my LaCie drive. At about the same time I purchased a new WD (3T) MyBook drive wanting more disk space and now that TM was suggesting I didn't have enough space on the LaCie, Partitioned 500g/500g, I thought a bigger drive would be better. I contacted WD and asked about installing the new drive and at first they suggested I hold off but after awhile they said go ahead and install it using Disk Utility, not any WD software. I have connected new drive (only a single partition, ie no partition, started up Time Machine. So far this is working fine. I'm still trying to figure out how I will get my photos of the LaCie drive. I think I will do it via another machine and then re format the LaCie and start over with it.

GetRealBro wrote:

But don't be in a hurry when trying to mount the drive, even in an older version of OSX. If the FileSystem is "dirty", even 10.6.8 will run a "long fsck" before mounting the drive and providing full access to the data.

That suggests that the root of your & similar problems is something that causes the drive to unmount "dirty." The "long fsck" is normal, expected behavior if the "short fsck" that always runs when a drive mounts detects a "dirty" file system.

You apparently have discovered a bug in Mavericks' version of Disk Utility that causes it to report that the drive needs to be reformatted when fsck is already running, but as long as you know that is a bogus message & don't do what it suggests, then it isn't going to cause any harm.

But there is still something apparently preventing the drive from unmounting "cleanly," & what it is remains to be discovered.

Just realized the presence of a folder called "WDufu" located in ~Library/Application Support

I guess this is stuff for upgrading the firmware of the external disk.

The interesting thing is that the modified date/time of this folder is the moment I repluged my external disk with the FW cable and that it spontaneously repartioned.

Also if you search the string "westerndigital" with the Find Any File tool, you will notice it finds a specific .xml file embeded in the Disk Utility application. Nothing to worry about as this is also present in Mountain Lion.

Basilic wrote:

Want to get rid of any WD sw remnants? Go straight to the point with the following Terminal commands as a search with the Finder is not as efficient:

sudo find -x / -iname com.wdc.\*

sudo find -x / -iname com.westerndigital.\*

sudo find -x / -iname com.wd\*

and manually trash all if anything found as the official WD uninstaller doesn't uninstall all, empty the bin and reboot-.

As a reminder all WD related pieces can be found in those directories:

/Library/Application Support

/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchDaemons

/Library/Preferences

/Library/PriviledgedHelperTools

/Library/StartupItems/

/System/Library/Extensions

Also, don't remove something called "wdhelper" that is unrelated to WD

Message was edited by: Basilic

Did you:

1. format in MacOSX ext. journal these WD drives?

yes, exactly

2. These are USB externals, correct? Not Firewire?

yes, exactly, USB 3.0

3. did you run Etrecheck to verify anything installed?

yes:

there was this:

User Login Items:

iTunesHelper

Dropbox

WDDriveUtilityHelper

WDSecurityHelper

but i removed them!

You have verified eliminatively, these ext. WD drives will mount on any system other than 10.9, so no bus or SATA issue relation.

yes, exactly

peppermint wrote:

there was this:

User Login Items:

iTunesHelper

Dropbox

WDDriveUtilityHelper

WDSecurityHelper

but i removed them!

Removed them yes, but then reformatted the drives after removing same?

You 10.9 eject / wont mount issue is indeterminate spotlight/ D.U. / fsck issue related.

I was presuming they were FW drives since the vast majority (near all) seem to be FW ext. drives.

Basilic

Just realized the presence of a folder called "WDufu"

I dont believe that folder is specific to causation, since its contents can be huge, rather a further sub-directory or action within same, which is why you noticed it changed at point of corruption.

http://www.filewatcher.com/b/ftp/24.42.190.219/shares/Top/Glenns%20MAC%20FILES/L ibrary/Application%20Support/WDufu/4416/JMicronDevicePlugin.app-0.html

Taking the two WD lines from the User Login Items, does not help: it will only prevent those two apps to start after a start of the mac. The WD install is still there. If you can find the Uninstaller, use it, or use FindAnyFile to search for all WD files on the mac, check carefully if it is westerndigital or not.

All these problems with drives (WD in particular)

1. are generated by the WD software, complete uninstall required, also format of the drive proposed. The WD drives smaller than 4TB are just good hardware. And are in some macs as main disk.

2. there may be some other software that is tampering with the WD drive (uninstall all tools and satsmart drivers).

3. do not use Raid.

4. It may be that the drive is dying, connect to another mac and run DiskUtility to verify the disk.

Lex

"Just realized the presence of a folder called "WDufu" located in ~Library/Application Support

I guess this is stuff for upgrading the firmware of the external disk. "

I also have WDufu in my system. Does anybody know anything about this "WDufu"? Is it really WD software?

It is WD related. If you drill down into the PLXDevicePlugin package you will notice only references to WesternDigital.

OK. Then is it OK to delete it?

WDufu probably has nothing to do with WesternDigital. Perhaps it has to do with Instagram. I do not have it on any of my computers.

Not do I have PLXDevicePlugin on my computers.

I would not listen to Basilic, dangerous talk.

PS: I DO have WD drives, smaller than 4TB, good hardware, but already avoid any softwares that are delivered with Lacie, WD, Seagate and all other drives. All drives work well in all OSX.

@LexSchellings

It has to do with WesternDigital as per the package content of the file called PLXDevicePlugin. I cannot upload a screenshot anymore here but I can tell I have seen stuff clearly related to WD (WD logo file, serial number list for instance)

I have now trashed all I could have found related to WesternDigital using the Find Any File tool. Be careful and don't mix up things with Wireless Diagnotics, wdhelper and the WesternDigital.xml file. The latter is embeded in the Disk Utilities.app

If you don't have the WDufu folder, that's because you never tried to upgrade the firmware of the WD disk?

What's the rationale with Instagram?

Message was edited by: Basilic