Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

I have finally trawled through the terabytes of data I was able to recover on the set of hard drives that got reformatted by the Western Digital Software as it interacted with Mavericks. Thankfully most of the data on those drives which was not backed up has been recovered. I have noticed some is missing but then that's my problem for not having it backed up in the first place. I will no longer let my backup routine slide as I did in the couple of months leading up to this whole Mavericks/WD fiasco.

I personally found that after my drive was reformatted it would mount in Mavericks and also in earlier versions of OSX and also on machines running Windows, but would show up as blank. therefore, the only option left to me was to run data recovery software.

It seems this was true in the majority of cases and that here is no solution to this problem except to remove any Western Digital Software on your computer and run data recovery on any affected drives. That is, if your drive was reformatted by the WD software after installing Mavericks.

For the record, I ran several data recovery programs on the affected drives and while none was able ot recover the file structure, I was able to recover the most data with Data Rescue 3. I even had the drive sent to Ontrack in Singapore where I live and they were able to do no better at recovering data than I was myself. Ontrack make the Easy Recovery 11 software which is what Western Digital were recommending and providing the license keys for.

If you don't have any data recovery software, and if your hard drive was reformatted by the WD software, contact WD until they give you the software to run data recovery or buy your own. Plenty of recommendations have been put forward in this discussion.

I have also experienced the long FSCK check noted in this thread. It appears to happen the first time I plug in a HD to a computer running Mavericks. The drives that have experienced this eventually mount and then subsequently seem to have no problems mounting. I have also noticed some odd GUI behaviour when opening Disk Utility. As the window animates to open it appears to momentarily freeze before finally opening fully.

Having followed this discussion for a long time and read every post I can only guess at what the underlying original issue was but to summerise the discussion and the observations by others posting here along with my own experience it may be that Apple Changed something in the way the OS interfaces with external Hard Drives and this change caused a conflict with the Western Digital software which then prompted the Western Digital software to reformat external hard drives, with RAID configured drives plugged in via firewire being the most susceptible, or at least the most reported as affected.

Other issues of data corruption and drives not mounting have been noted here but not all are related to the changes in Mavericks and the specific issue of the Western Digital software reformatting the drives. The main take away from this is back up your data, back up your backups and invest in some good data recovery software for those times when catastrophe strikes...

Thanks all for an informative and sometimes lively discussion. I hope everyone who lost data was able to recover some (most) if not all and that we all learned to be more paranoid in regards backing up data and less trusting in the diligence performed by the multi million dollar companies whose products we rely on for work and play.

Tom.

So, since I have never installed an external HD on my Mac without first deleting the software that came with it and reformatting it, do I have anything to worry about if I upgrade to Mavericks?

Yes?

Richard Campbell2 wrote:

I am now convinced that the answer to the Maverick vs. External Drive battle, at least for Western Dig drives,

This has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with WD physical hardware. 😊

blindeyetom wrote:

Data recovery software is a measure only needed for those who failed to expect HD failure / crash/ data loss on a drive(s).

Redundant copies of ones data in place makes all data recovery software both irrelevant and utterly useless.

'failure to plan, is a plan for failure'

Robert Elston wrote:

So, since I have never installed an external HD on my Mac without first deleting the software that came with it and reformatting it, do I have anything to worry about if I upgrade to Mavericks?

Yes?

Only if you don't have backups of the data you use with 10.9.

There are several issues in this thread, some happened without WD software installed so I think the best advice is simply to make sure the data exists somewhere else.

I set up my Seagate 500GB Back up plus on and Imac running Snow Leopard. The use to be as an external drive (rather than USB sticks) for between home and at work where work runs windows 2007. All was working well until i recentl purchased a MacBook Air running Mavericks. Now when I plug the Seagate drive into the Macbook Air it shows as READ ONLY drive and nothing in the 'get info' panel to unlock it. I can not even drag and drop to the Seagate from the desktop of the MacBokk Air. NOT happy at all with this conflict.

GetRealBro wrote:

V Dubreeze wrote:

GetRealBro, this is EXACTLY what I just went through. ...

Cutting to the chase…

The Disk Utility errors are due to a bug in Disk Utility that shows up when Disk Utility attempts to Verify or Repair a partition that is already "busy" running a long file check (fsck_hfs) that can take several minutes. You can verify this by checking your Disk Utiltiy log and fsck_hfs log with the Console utility.

These long fsck_hfs runs occur after Mavericks runs a short fsck_hfs a the time of the mount and discovers that the file system is “dirty”. Mavericks then kicks of a much longer fcsk_hfs run that repairs the file system. In my testing I have experienced this issue dozens of times and EVERY time the longer fsck_hfs run was able to ‘fix’ the dirty file system. I have not lost a single bit of data.

But— although I was able to reproduce the “dirty” file system and subsequent long fsck_hfs run many times, I was never able to determine why the file system was left "dirty" when it was unmounted. My advice is to eliminate, or at least reduce, the number of background processes that access an external drive (e.g. Spotlight) until this issue is clearly resolved.

FWIW I think this problem is the result of a flaw(s) in how Mavericks cleans up the file system when it unmounts a partition.

— GetRealBro

GetRealBro, I have had a major breakthrough, and it's one of those things I would never have tried. I found a blog post by someone describing a similar thing to what I was going through, though his jist was getting error 50 on a 4TB drive that he knew was good. He called Apple and they told him to put the Energy Saver button to put drives to sleep when possible, which, as a video editor he had kept off to avoid having to wait for the drives to come back before saving, and it had never caused a problem before with any system or drive size. His blog post was from last July so it's not Mavericks but I'm assuming ML. It worked.

I have two MBPs, 10.9.1 and 10.6.8. I've never had Lion or ML, so for me it all changed with my first extra large drive under Mavericks. With even my working externals acting not perfectly under Mavericks I've had the drive sleep button off also, in hopes that it would not contribute to the random dismounting, and also set the computer to never sleep. I've been sleeping them manually since 10.9, as this MBP is my media editing computer as well. Now I had done one other thing which might prevent a proper revue which is that I had given up on partitioning the 3TB drives just before I saw this and had reformatted and not partitioned. I didn't feel like reformatting and repartitioning the drives for the 20th time in a week so I went right to his advice with the drives as they were. I just finished filling both Toshiba 3TB drives alternating in the Icy Dock with zero issues. I couldn't even copy 2 Gigs before. Disk Utility now verifies the drives all the way through instead of stopping with alerts.

I could test it by turning drive sleep back off but when I would get errors previously it always required a trip to Terminal to reformat and partition as DU couldn't do it, so I'm leaving as is for now. Two days of transferring with no problems is a big enough gift. I'll troubleshoot it more in the future when I can handle it.

So to sum up, for me, in Mavericks, either not partitioning OR keeping the Energy Settings at their ON default seems to have solved my problem.

Best,

v

lenniefalcon wrote:

There are myriads of difficulties with many drives. The problem lies within the memory controller of each drive in question. Some of the contollers will not function with Mavericks under any circumstance. Your strarting point should be to find out the ones with known instances of failure and restrict your choice(s) of drive(s) to those without known difficulties.

Is there a hardware compatibility list for Mavericks?

That could help.

(I know such a list exists for software.)

I know that OWC (Macsales.com, Other World Computing) has numerous drive and housing combinations that work, plus their customer support is great. They won't sell you anything that doesn't work, if you talk with them before ordering.

The other drives, that I personally use and therefore know they work, are the Samsung 840 Pro SSDs. They're about $1USD/GB, though often on promotion.

Good Luck!!

Hello, I had a WD MyBook Studio II Raid 1 external drive erased by Mavericks some months ago and I quickly went back to MacOs 10.7 from a clone. I've been working with this setup since then.

From what I read in this (huge) thread, it sems that all my drives (numerous drives with 20Tb of data in them) are still at risk if I upgrade to the most recent version Mavericks and that I would have to re-format all those drives from within Mavericks in order to be able to use them safely. Am I correct?

André Vanasse1 wrote:

From what I read in this (huge) thread, it sems that all my drives (numerous drives with 20Tb of data in them) are still at risk if I upgrade to the most recent version Mavericks and that I would have to re-format all those drives from within Mavericks in order to be able to use them safely. Am I correct?

That isn't how I understand this. There have been a few issues that I'm almost certainly mixing up, but I think the general view of people following along is that 10.9 can break external disks in several strange ways…

You must ensure you have NO WD software installed - this has caused disks to be reformatted & to be renamed MyBook (or similar default 'WD names').

Sometimes disks can take a long time to mount, show an error to the user and Disk Utility claims it can't fix it. GetRealBro calls this the 'long fsck' in his documentation of the issue here.

Others have reported 'empty or reformatted' disks but without the 'WD tools' renaming the disk, so it may or may not be caused by 10.9.

I don't recall anyone saying a reformat fixed the disks in 10.9 and prevented these issues ever happening again.

The best advice I have is don't use any disk with 10.9 that isn't backed up elsewhere, I suspect others have different opinions.

André Vanasse1 wrote:

From what I read in this (huge) thread, it sems that all my drives (numerous drives with 20Tb of data in them) are still at risk if I upgrade to the most recent version Mavericks and that I would have to re-format all those drives from within Mavericks in order to be able to use them safely. Am I correct?

I assume you refer to that answer from Seagate mentioned here before:

[...] This is no incompatibility of the drives with Mavericks, all drives should be compatible, this is a change of the requirements of the OS to the drives, used with it, expecially those, that are connected to the System during update process. After a de-initialisation and re-intitialisation as GPT with UEFI and formatting under Mavericks, those drives will work again perfectly fine. The data will be lost, so to have a backup of the external drive is recommended during the update and the first use of the external drive with Mavericks.

I hope someone could explain this part a bit more detailed:

"a de-initialisation and re-intitialisation as GPT with UEFI and formatting under Mavericks"

?

For any new posters here who haven't read this entire thread: The issue with Hard Drives being reformatted and renamed as 'MyBook' was an incompatabiltiy issue with Western Digital software. If you do not have any Western Digital software installed on your computer this particular issue will not occur, whatever version of Mavericks you use.

Since removing the Western Digital Software on my computer, I have had no issues with data being damaged on my Hard Drives under Mavericks.

I have encountered the long fsck check that has occasionally occured and been documented here but even with the long fsck check the drives eventually mount and the data is fine. There are of course other issues that can cause data corruption but the specific issue dealt with in this thread (for the main part) is the one with the Western Digital software causing drives to be reformatted.

In this thread you can find the steps for identifying and removing the Western Digital software. The first recommended step is to download and run the etrecheck softwarehttp://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck.

The results of that check will identify any WD software. If there is none, then you will not have an issue. If you do, then either update the software by downloading the latest version from Western Digital or manually remove it.

I personally manually removed it by following these steps.

Using Apple’s Activity Monitor from /Applications/Utilities quit the following processes:

WDDMService

WD Quick View

SmartwareServerApp

Delete /Library/LaunchDeamons/com.wdc.WDDMService.plist (Entry that causes WDDM to start.)

Delete /Library/LaunchDeamons/com.wdc.WDSmartWareServer.plist (Entry that causes the SmartWare Server to start.)

Delete /Applications Support/WDSmartware (Removes all SmartWare support programs)

Delete /Application/WDSmartWare (SmartWare user interface)

Delete Library/Preferences/com.wdc.smartware.plist

From System Preferences->Users Login Items remove WDQuickview for all users. (Entry that runs WD Quick View when a user logs in. There should be a single entry for all users. Deleting it from one any account should remove it for all accounts.)

Then run etrecheck again to make sure all the WD software has been removed.

Of course, all your data should be backed up, so if you do plug in a drive and it gets corrupted for any reason at all, it won't be a problem because you will have other copies of the data. Sensible advice is to have at least a back up and then a seond back up for redundency.

When my drive was reformatted by the Western Digital software/Mavericks incompatability issue I lost about a months worth of work because I had been neglecting my back up routine. Fortunately the majority of my data was backed up and I have since been able to recover most of the lost data with software, in my case specifically it was Data Rescue 3 that gave the best results.

I have, both erased and reformatted, 3TB Seagate Backup Plus and a 3TB WD Mybook. No 3rd party software on either.

Ran activity manager and see none of the problematic processes.

Even though I'm still using 10.6.8, I got and ran etresoft and did a scan.It says I don't have any WD or Seagate software except: com.seagate.notificationexec.plist 3rd-Party support link. Unfortunately, when I search for this file with finder it doesn't show up. Is this a problem?

If I get another HD, purge it of all 3rd party software and reformat it in Mavericks, can I then attach the Seagagate and Myboxok in order to transfer data to the new HD? If not, how can I access the data on the older drives if running Mavericks?

Robert Elston wrote:

com.seagate.notificationexec.plist 3rd-Party support link.

Unfortunately, when I search for this file with finder it doesn't show up.

Find Any File (Mac App Store) can find it.

Drew Reece wrote:

André Vanasse1 wrote:

From what I read in this (huge) thread, it sems that all my drives (numerous drives with 20Tb of data in them) are still at risk if I upgrade to the most recent version Mavericks and that I would have to re-format all those drives from within Mavericks in order to be able to use them safely. Am I correct?

That isn't how I understand this. There have been a few issues that I'm almost certainly mixing up, but I think the general view of people following along is that 10.9 can break external disks in several strange ways…

I read that 10.9.2 that just came out does not fix those issues. I guess I will stick with Mountain Lion until those issues are well understood and I can feel safe to upgrade to Mavericks. Last november I had a WD RAID 1 re-formated and I lost a Final Cut Pro project and the arborescence that allowed FCP to connect to the video data. That cost me a bundle.