Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Paz.americano wrote:

Same Issue, New System:

After Reboot of my iMac two drives named MyBook and two drives named EFI where on my desktop. Missing was: PegasusHaven and ArtBackup. One set of MyBook and EFI had the logo on it from my Pegasus R8 and the other set from my Seagate external USB3 drive (standard Drive Icons from apple).

I shut down again everything and rebooted. After that there where only the two MyBook drives on my desktop.

Both drives still had their capacity but where "completely empty" as they where formatted.

I bought a new iMac a couple of weeks ago, and this week I installed WD Drive Utilities that I downloaded from their webpage. As I needed to reconfigure a My Passport Pro Thunderbold Raid. After that all was fine, and I do not turn off my computer often. After a couple of days, working on my Pegasus Drive all the time, I shut the iMac down, next day booting the issue appeared.

OS X 10.11, iMac 15.1

Promise Pegases R8 2 RAID - Thunderbolt - 32TB, RAID 06, 24TB capacity - Original Drive-Name: PromiseHaven

After reboot: MyBook and EFI, and 24TB as before on MyBook, but empty. All files gone.

Issue from WD Drive Utility Software after online research. I am not the only one. WD support talked to me as they never heard of it. Also saying they do not support other brand drives. (Of course not, and starting WD Drive Utility only shows you WD Drives, so you actually can not access other drives)

So does anyone know what happened and what is best to do to get back my files?

A couple of Production on it. Form which are about 7TB of Data that are more than important.

External WD Drives are not affected!

Thank you!

Firstly you should start a fresh thread about this, since you're not using Mavericks. (This is a very old thread.)

But I will try to help you.

Firstly you should turn off the affected drive and do not turn it back on until you are ready to recover the files with the appropriate software. If you have the drives connected to your computer, anything that you do (such as formatting them, or erasing them) could ruin your chances of ever recovering them.

Second of all, for future reference, no hard drive should ever need any third party software installed on your computer. It's simply unnecessary.

Third of all, Western Digital is one of the worst companies I've ever done business with. Every single WD hard disk that I've ever used has crashed and failed within 1 year. A good friend of mine had a Western Digital external hard disk and made the mistake of installing their terrible software. It totally ruined her entire computer by corrupting the PRAM and PMU. This made her fans not run even when the machine was very hot. It cooked her logic board. As soon as I removed that software and reset her PRAM and PMU, then the fans started coming back on—but the damage was done. Point is, never use Western Digital products. EVER.

Fourth of all, did you have a backup of your 24TB RAID? If not, why not? You should always keep a backup. Although, I have to imagine that even if you did, WD's software could have easily corrupted BOTH. (I always burn my really important projects to 50-year archival 50GB blu-ray disks, but with a 7TB project I can imagine that would be a huge PITA.)

Fifth of all, if you don't have a backup, in order to recover your data you are going to need some specialized software, and you're going to need a disk drive big enough to store the recovered files. If you are trying to recover a 24TB RAID, you're going to need another 24TB RAID to recover onto. Even if only 7TB of your data is the part you need to recover, unfortunately, it is not always feasible to selectively recover data. You just have to run the recovery and cross your fingers. Recovering from a RAID not a high chance of success, if it was a striped array.

Sixth of all, what tool should you use? The first thing that I would suggest you try is running DiskWarrior to rebuild the directory. Sometimes that can be a miracle worker. If that fails, then I would run TechTool Pro to try to repair the disk. If those two fail, then I would run Prosoft Data Rescue 3 on the disk. That's where you're gonna need another drive to recover to. Since you should have a backup RAID anyway, maybe it's time to invest in a second Pegasus to serve as your backup so this can never happen again.

Oh any before you do ANYTHING FURTHER, erase all that Western Digital stuff off your computer. If I were you, I would sue them.

Good luck.

Hello,

DaddieMac wrote:

Point is, never use Western Digital products. EVER.

What would you recommend instead?

Something from http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/1394/USB/EliteAL/eSATA_FW800_FW400_USB

Thanks, but I'm in the UK. Another tip...?

Try doing a search yourself.

Hi DaddieMac

Yes, I usually have everything three times, So everything from up to last month, except the about 7TB important data was on a second Raid, same size, and on a Network 72TB Raid with a time-machine backup. That one I just bought and activated, and I turned of the computer to start new and then turn on TM again.

That is where this happened. WD is bad, so much I found out on searching for my problem. Deinstalled it right away.

Unfortunate that it happened right at that moment. I have that WD software on my computer for a log time... really terrible.

I am just running DataRescue 4 (not 3, is 3 the better choice?), and then will recover as much as possible, after that I will try the other two options you mentioned, as I do not want anything to try to do anything on the drive before I tried to recover just the plain files. And as far as I know, Data Rescue is "read only". So it should not do anything with that RAID. I ran it once already and it found a lot of files, but it did not know the files I was needing, so I taught him these files, and fingers crossed, hope it finds those files. Even if it is a lot of work then to sort everything, (60K files) but better that then total loss.

Would you go Disc-Warior first, or try Tech-tool first?

Thank you,

Well any drive can fail, so always have redundant backups. I stick with Seagate personally. Just like any drive, they can fail too, but I have had pretty good luck with them over-all so far.

There is not a brand of external housing that I trust, which is why I bought a Mac Pro in 2009, after the FireWire ports failed on each of my external drives that I was using with my laptop. I do have a small external Rocstor ArcticRoc 2T RAID for TimeMachine of the Mac Pro, but of course yesterday, one of its drives failed LOL. At least the ports still work on it.

I would buy a new Mac Pro now, but you can't get one with drive bays anymore! I couldn't believe that Apple discontinued their only expandable tower machine! Now what am I gonna do? Apple makes me so angry sometimes.

Yes, I even had double redundancy ... but that does not help against a software that is from WD and effects to delete the files-structure on a Pegasus drive!

As for no internal drives in the new macPro. I like it. I work with external Raids anyway. And Thunderbolt two is faster then the internal SATA-Bus if you would have conventional drives. So it is even faster this way.

coxorange wrote:

Hello,

DaddieMac wrote:

Point is, never use Western Digital products. EVER.

What would you recommend instead?

Anything else

Paz.americano wrote:

Yes, I even had double redundancy ... but that does not help against a software that is from WD and effects to delete the files-structure on a Pegasus drive!

As for no internal drives in the new macPro. I like it. I work with external Raids anyway. And Thunderbolt two is faster then the internal SATA-Bus if you would have conventional drives. So it is even faster this way.

Well to me it's a matter of expense. I think my Mac Pro was $3500 and then I threw in $500 worth of hard drives and a $150 Blue-Ray. All of that with a single power cord, no cables that can get disconnected accidentally or where the ports can get wiggly and go bad on the made-in-China external enclosure, no crappy wall warts or other such cheaply done power supplies dangling around like ticking time bombs waiting for their capacitors to die, just everything inside of a tank made by Apple with a single security lock keeping it all secure, with dual optical drives and four HDDs, for under $4200 brand new.

Now I understand Thunderbolt's advantages over SATA but if I cared that much about speed I could still install a PCIe RAID card and four SSDs, and be better off than whatever is inside of that new Mac Pro, and still have spent less than if I bought a new Mac Pro plus the requisite 4-bay external Thunderbolt 2 RAID enclosure and drives for it. Am I wrong?

What's more, I can buy an off-the-shelf PC GPU card and download NVIDIA's "web drivers" and have myself a really good card for pretty cheap. In fact I did that in 2011, put in a GTX 570 for $200 off Craigslist and doubled my CUDA/OpenCL over the GTX 285. Had to sacrifice the EFI boot screen but who cares?

If I go new Mac Pro, then I'll need two new external drive enclosures: one for the Blu-Ray, and one for my primary storage RAID. What's more, since 6TB of my main drives are in an OS X proprietary striped soft-RAID, I need new HDDs in the new primary RAID to transfer my data to. Going with a decent 4-bay unit to match my current capacity, that's an extra $1000 at least, two extra crappy Chinese-made power supplies, two more ugly third-party enclosures littering my desk with their cables and bad design aesthetics (even LaCie is ugly IMHO), and however many extra security cables to lock it all down.

Plus now I'll have to encrypt my primary drives, slowing everything down, because otherwise any random intruder could just unhook the cable, plug it into their own machine, and directly copy all my data. (This is not possible when the drives are inside your Mac.)

Apple could have kept making the tower model and offered it with Thunderbolt ports as well. They could afford to buy Greece for crying out loud. But no, instead they are busy making a frickin' car, or some other nonsense. They discontinue Aperture and iPhoto too. Sigh.

Oh and of course to get PCIe slots with new Mac Pro then I also have to buy some ridiculous and expensive PCIe chassis, and who knows if Windows will recognize those cards under bootcamp? These chassis like Sonnet Echo Express III costs you freakin $1000 for three slots to match the current Mac Pro, and who knows if it works under Windows or lets you use a GPU? Sonnet doesn't list a single GPU card as being compatible. Heck for $1000 you can build an entire Hackintosh with 3 PCI slots!

So yeah why would I buy this cylinder Mac Pro when it means I then have to spend another $2000+ on accessories and be at the mercy of third party drivers and cover my desk in peripherals that all require extra plugs and cords, all have noisy fans and ugly bright LEDs, etc.?

Isn't it so much nicer to have it all wrapped up inside that gorgeous monolithic cheese grater case of the Mac Pro, with its thick beautiful aluminum panels keeping everything safe and its well-managed fans cooling down everything?

No-one is forcing you to buy a new MP, if you don't want one, don't buy one, it's a free country.

Personally I am very happy that the ludicrous battleship that was the old one is no more, but thats just me.

me too, I love the new tower.

But if you want one of the older ones, buy it, upgrade the CPU and GPU and you are all set.

Exept you can not ad 2x8drvies in there... what I got external.

And it is as fast as TB2 can get.

But off topic anyway!

I also have a Seagate 1T dual Firewire 800 and USB thatIve been using as a back up. I can't eject it, copy to it, or do anything except run terminal commands it. Disk Utility can't eject it to reformat it and I can't eject it from the finder. I used a terminal trick to overwrite and destroy the partition so I can try to reformat it again. No go tho it says resource busy. I gotta find my SL install disk and see if I can work on using that disk utility. El Captain is more like El Stinko IMO.