Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

I came to page 10 of this thread..

Since we are months further now I was wondering if any one has a solution for:

1. configurating my computer in such a way so that I can connect my harddisks again without running the risk to loose all their data.

2. which recovery software gets best results.

3. Wether there is any initiative to let apple and/or WD know that they can't let this happen ever again.

Best regards,

Steye

or maybe if theres a page somewhere that has an summary of all solutions.

There are no solutions. Apple has never commented on or acknowledged the issue. WD has only acknowledged an issue with an older version of their software that has since been updated. Most of the comments and solutions offered in this thread are of dubious worth and may not even be related to the original problem. None of the major technical web sites are currently covering this issue. As with most threads like this one there are numerous conflicting reports and anecdotal evidence of a real, reproducible issue. Yes, if you perform a Google search on the topic there lots of hits but that really doesn't mean anything. This thread may be 96 pages long but if you take the time to read through it you will find many different issues lumped into this supposed issue. It has now taken on a life of its own and has been taken as fact by those with issues. That is not the case at all.

If your WD drive was formatted for OSX, then use Disk Drill to run their Free partition scan.

With a little patience, the drive will magically mount halfway through the scan.

My issue: A fully functinal 1TB WD Passport drive would not mount after installing OSX Mavericks on my MackBook nor would it recognize with Disk Utlity.

Formatting was never an option and I don't throw things that are important to me....

I orginally formatted the drive out of the box with MacOS Extend(Journaled) on Mountain Lion, then successlly backed up my MacBook with TimeMachine. This drive wouldn't mount after installing Mavericks. ***. This never happens! Save yourself some time and go get Disk Drill to rebuild your partitioin table.

Good Luck!

Rustproof wrote:

If your WD drive was formatted for OSX, then use Disk Drill to run their Free partition scan.

Tlhank you! Just to clarify, by "Free partition scan" do you mean that you used the free downloadable version of Disk Drill as opposed to the "Pro" version?

The free version will scan a disk, if you want to keep the results around or mount the results as a disk you'll need to pay.

The Disk Drill site has the specifics…

http://www.cleverfiles.com/pro.html

Yes. Download the free version, scan the drive, and come back here to let us know the drive mounted with Mavericks. http://www.cleverfiles.com/pro.html

I used the free version without paying anything.

Rustproof wrote:

Yes. Download the free version, scan the drive, and come back here to let us know the drive mounted with Mavericks. http://www.cleverfiles.com/pro.html

I used the free version without paying anything.

I hope I don't need to use it. I'm going to be upgrading a late 2012 iMac from 10.8.5 to 10.9.3 and I'm just doing my due diligence. My Carbon Copy Cloner drive is a WD Ultra and my Time Machine Drive is a 2TB WD Mybook Studio which seems to be the subject of many reports. I'll be deselecting the MyBook as my Time Machine drive and disconnecting both drives before the upgrade, but if things still go south I'll try using Disk Drill. Thanks for your help!

I hear ya... It's scary when it happens, but it would be as soon as the WD drive is connected via USB to OSX Mavericks. Just to play it safe, I would kick off another Time Machine backup from a drive already formatted with Mavericks before your upgrade.

If you want to play it safe edw2, just check you have no WD software installed.

It has been covered in this thread so many times I have lost track.

My WD drive was formatted with Lion or Mountain Lion and therfore didn't have WD software when my WD drive became unmountable with Mavericks.

I've read the finger pointing many times about the WD software, but this wouldn't make sense unless the dirve becomes unmountable after installing WD software.

The WD software, if installed, is on the Mac. Even if you format the HD, the software is still in the computer.

The most important thing is to make sure 100% that there is no WD software in your computer.

If needed to be, install the OS from scratch, rather than update.

I had this issue today with my WD 1TB USB drive. Whenever I tried to access the drive, it would cause Finder, Disk Utility, Disk Warrior and Terminal to freeze and prevent me from doing anything.

I hunted through the Console logs and saw tons of this stuff - usually whenever Finder was trying to browse through the folders (Vault is the name of my external drive):

CoreStorageGroup::completeIORequest - error 0xe00002ca detected for LVG "Vault" (FB57C8CD-BD4B-4BC8-8336-05F751198E89), pv 22E6402B-8629-48D7-8E93-305D237E3CFD, near LV byte offset = 3080282112.

I eventually saw a thread where someone mentioned that they had deleted the .DS_Store file in the root of the external drive's folder along with about 20 other things and they didn't quite know what fixed it. Well - that's what did it for me. Here's what I did:

1. Plugged in my external drive
2. Opened Terminal
3. Changed directory to /Volumes/Vault
4. Typed "rm -rf .DS_Store" (this took a while, I had to leave my machine for about 30 mins because I got tired of waiting for the prompt to return)

After this everything worked again and I was able to verify that there weren't any physically bad sectors on the HD and that all the content / files were still there.

My report: I upgraded from 10.8.5 to 10.9.3 last Tuesday. Before upgrading, I disconnected the two WD drives that I use for cloning and Time Machine backups, and deselected the TM drive (My 2TB Passport Studio) in Time Machine. I also ran "verify disk" on all my drives without any issues. Then I upgraded. Since upgrading I've had no problems with either drive. They've both been working normally. I believe everyone who has described their issues. Any number of factors could be in play including manufacturing run or who-knows-what.

Unfortunately upgrading wasn't without incident. I now have problems with Apple Mail and sporadically have to force quit the application. It's also crashed once on start, but I don't think I've lost any messages or folders. I'd almost rather have the drive problem, but at least I have Apple Care and so far their representatives have been great. Hang in their everybody.

Wow, so I read through 96 pages of different people stating various problems and solutions to this thread, to see if I could find a nugget that would help me fix my problem. And I feel like most, if not all, of the solutions are speculative at best because Apple has not clearly stated that there is any issue with Mavericks regarding external hard drives no longer being detected. I wish to add my descriptive problem to this graveyard, in hopes that someone out there sees the symptoms and can push me in the right direction.

My problem: I have a Macbook Pro that had Mountain Lion OSX preinstalled, an external 1TB Toshiba USB HD, and an external 1TB WD USB HD, all worked great for well over a year. Installed Mavericks a month ago, then suddenly both hard drives could no longer be detected after the upgrade. However, if I plug either of these hard drives into my Windows 7 OS custom desktop machine, or even my Windows 7 HP laptop machine, I can both read/write to either the Toshiba hard drive or the Western Digital hard drive to this day (still works). When I first got both of the hard drives over a year ago, I had formatted the Toshiba HD using my Macbook Pro (HFS), and I had formatted my WD HD using my Windows HP Laptop (NTFS). I've tried to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on my Macbook Pro, shutting down completely and restarting, and also ensuring power adapter is connected for power. Both drives refuse to be detected since the Mavericks upgrade on my Macbook Pro on any of the USB ports on my laptop (I have two USB ports, one on each side of the laptop). The USB cables are fine, the hard drives are fine as well (they function on two other machines). This problem sounds like it is regardless of the hard drive manufacturer, and points to the Mavericks OS itself by Apple. Perhaps I forgot to unmount them properly at some point in time, but I refuse to believe that my hard drives are actually unusable and "corrupted", and hope that Apple can submit an official fix for this problem that renders my backup solutions to be useless.