Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

lkrupp wrote:

Yes you do have, or did have WD software installed. There is a remnant of the installation on your system.

[failed] com.apple.wdhelper.plist

under Problem System Launch Daemons. This means this file is launched at startup and fails for some reason. You need to re-examine your system.

That is an Apple system job. Don't disable or delete it. WD = wireless diagnostics, it runs when wifi needs attention as far as I know.

toismonts wrote:

Like adam I have no WD software as far as i can tell.

Yup, none loaded.

But you do have a couple of problematic items

Kernel Extensions:

[kext loaded] com.avast.AvastFileShield (2.1.0 - SDK 10.9) Support

[kext loaded] com.avast.PacketForwarder (1.4 - SDK 10.9) Support

[kext loaded] com.rim.driver.BlackBerryUSBDriverInt (0.0.64) Support

[not loaded] com.rim.driver.BlackBerryUSBDriverVSP (0.0.74) Support

Avast is pretty much wholly bad, false positives and performance degradation is its speciality (and if you run through your report you'll find many areas from which it should be removed). Remove it.

Blackberry drivers are also only marginally stable on Mavericks, remove them (unless you actually have a Blackberry)

I doubt that either of these had anything to do with the drive issue however.

Reboot into Safe Mode and check the drive again.

lkrupp wrote:

Yes you do have, or did have WD software installed. There is a remnant of the installation on your system.

[failed] com.apple.wdhelper.plist

This is NOT Western Digital software, it is part of OSX.

Drew correctly identified it.

Do Not Remove.

Quote:

I actually have been installing bare drives into external enclosures for some time now and agree that its the best way to go. However I now have the Western Digital/Mavericks 'empty drive' problem in a quality enclosure with a WD Black WD200FAEX drive installed. This is a quality drive....but its the one that was working fine [ with Mavericks] and now suddenly won't read.

Basically same problem as described by so many people on the forums.

There still appears to be no real fix for the problem yet.

Can't find the quote option when I post from my iPad: would blockquote tags work?

That's good info, thanks to the fact that you can isolate the problem to the drive: one of the advantages I mentioned when I posted about the benefits of acquiring the enclosure and drive separately.

I also recall there being problems with cheap USB2 external drives not being functional outside of their enclosures: another reason to roll your own.

Thanks to this discussion, I am not going to give away a 1TB WD external (bought new in box for $20 at a stoop sale) to a friend who just installed Mavericks. Maybe there will be a fix, but I'm not holding my breath.

Csound1 wrote:

lkrupp wrote:

Yes you do have, or did have WD software installed. There is a remnant of the installation on your system.

[failed] com.apple.wdhelper.plist

This is NOT Western Digital software, it is part of OSX.

Drew correctly identified it.

Do Not Remove.

I'm an idiot.

Been there 🙂

I have a late 2012 iMac with a 1TB Fusion drive running Mountain Lion 10.8.5. I've held off updating to Mavericks, but with the release of 10.9.3 I was going to pull the trigger.

I have two backup drives. My Time Macine drive is a 2TB WD MyBook Studio and the drive I use with Carbon Copy Cloner is a 2TB WD My Passport Ultra. I didn't reformat the MyBook Studio before use, as it was already properly formatted, but I never used the WD backup software, and I deleted that software at some point after I started using the drive. For the My Passport Ultra, I reformatted the entire drive (all partitions) with a single pass zero overwrite in Disk Utility. In Mountain Lion both drives work without any issues. In fact, I can boot off the cloned image on the My Passport Ultra.

A couple of questions:

Have the reported problems occurred only after updating from Mountain Lion to Mavericks, or are there instances where a WD drive worked with Mavericks 10.9.2 but stopped working with 10.9.3?

Anybody know how pervasive this issue is? WD MyBook Studio drives used to be sold out of Apple stores, so you would expect adverse reports to start piling up at some point.

I was running Mavericks 10.9.2 and using an external 2TB WD2002FAEX drive connected via firewire to my laptop. It worked well for about 3 months and then the data vanished suddenly one day leaving 1 EMPTY partition where there had been 2 before ....750GBs gone. Took the drive to an Apple authorized store here in Berlin and they said the partitions were hopelessly corrupted.

The tech person there said this same problem was showing up a lot, but when they spoke to Western Digital...no response.

I've written as well....nothing.

Check the forums, you will see that essentially the same problem has been happenning to many, many people.

Its very unfortunate because WD drives have a great reputation.

But stay away from the external WD hard drive and Mavericks combination till they issue a firmware fix!

And complain like **** to them!

My WD drives are functioning well. The only trouble I have seen is with people installing the unnecessary WD software crap that often comes with drives. Otherwise they function as well as most other external drives. As I say, never never accompanying software.

Cheers

Pete

Sorry, but I have never installed WD or any other accompanying software that comes with drives and format only with Apple Disk Utility. Still like many others who also did not install WD software, I also had this problem.

Normally WD drives are great, but even Apple tech people are confirming that the problem exists.

It seems to be the external WD hard drive and Mavericks combination.

Likewise here, even a fresh install, reset of the system and still the problem. For me, it appears to only be with large capacity drives (zero issues with drives upwards of 320GB thus far, both WD and Seagate and countless USB thumb drives). No WD or any software like that installed or ever for that matter. My system is a late 2013 iMac, so I am wondering if this may be a compatibility problem with the chipset on the motherboards? I am curious if this is isolated to the newer iMac hardware, not sure if in the many, many previous pages there is any trend.

Nope, nothing here with any WD drives, and even if there was it wod be a problem I would address to WD who admitted to some fats on their part. I don't see how Apple can help you but you can contact them if you wish through the proper channels.

Good luck

Pete

quick update on my Mybook Studio II issues, I removed Avast and Blackberry as reccomended but drive still would not seem compatible, with my 2010 IMAC and mavericks. It got to the point where the MBII in 2TB striped config is either not recognised by disk utility or crashes disk utility or disk utilkity wont allow any action on it. I confirm it can still be wiped by a Windows 7 machine but cannot be reset by OSX, Unless there is a OSX/WD driver and firmware fix I assume it will not work. I did not try in safe mode. I have bought a £10 USB enclosure off Ebay and I removed one of the drives from the StudioII. Attached the drive in the enclosure , Used disk utiity to do a 1 pass format that took 4 hours. Set up as a journalled OSX disk and Voila time machine comlpeted its first backup of 590G in 11 hours (excluding a lot of data as only 1TB available). That is the first Time machine backup I have managed in 6 weeks. So this may help somebody who does not want to reinvest in expensive external drives(given the WD cost £300 initially) , it does seem the WD drives are fine just the enclosure hardware and firmware has been made imcompatible with latest Mavericks OSX. So still my opnion that its OSX and WD together, and the issue manifested with OSX update. I have raised faults/bugs/ complaints to both companies through official channels, no response. I now have working USB seagate freeagent drives and the 1TB WD Caviar Green drives (12062009) from the StudioII enclosure (easy to remove albeit with the aid of a screwdriver). Now for the time being I will buy another ebay enclosure for the 2nd 1TB and try and raid them with OSX and ultimately hope a fix for the Mybook is found.

My WD My Book HD was working flawlessly for nearly a year through varius upgrades UNTIL 10.9.3 It was attached to my 2011 iMac when I upgraded to 10.9.3 form 10.9.2. Now the drive is read only, even on the when i attache it to my MacBook air 2013.

Do you have a bootable copy of an older OS? Have you verified or repaired the disk?

Some issues in here have shown that sometimes a disk works OK on an older OS. It is also possible that the disk itself is the issue, so trying another OS should help rule that out.