Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

pete and ponti conniving possibly waiting for rcr to back them up.

I feel an all out assalt coming

Have i no friends here ?

i look back through the posts and discovered one signed off with ' Your Friend Pete"

Oh my god what have i done.

I appreciate the banter of all here. Gives me something to whinge and laugh about.

Am off on xmas hols now, not sure where i will store xmas family videos when i get back .

Hope all is sorted by then. Merry Xmas to all Pete too.

cheers H.

CALLOHANh wrote:

 

pete and ponti conniving possibly waiting for rcr to back them up.

 

I feel an all out assalt coming

Have i no friends here ?

i look back through the posts and discovered one signed off with ' Your Friend Pete"

Oh my god what have i done.

I appreciate the banter of all here. Gives me something to whinge and laugh about.

Am off on xmas hols now, not sure where i will store xmas family videos when i get back .

Hope all is sorted by then. Merry Xmas to all Pete too.

 

cheers H.

Thanks for the giggle. careful on the roads, it's raining still.

Pete

"Yes, but how many of those makers use the 'MyBook' name after reformatting disks"

Come on Drew, I meant what I said: everyone has to take care NOT to install software at all, that came with the disk. I was not referring to the MyBook title.

Lex

Pete and H:

How about this joke: one Australian said to anoth.....

have a nice Chrstmas you two...

Lex

LexSchellings wrote:

 

Pete and H:

How about this joke: one Australian said to anoth.....

 

have a nice Chrstmas you two...

Lex

Thanks Lex. Same for you and yours.

(we are only talking a distance of about 100kms, so may bump into him over Xmas without knowing! I'll have to wear a name tag! lol)

Have a great festive season. I do the last recording on Tuesday arvo then shut the studio doors for a week.

I hope Mavericks isn't responsible for wrecking my holidays as it seems to be for every other world issue!!

Cheers

Pete

GetRealBro wrote:

The installer for OSX 10.9  scanned the boot partition and warned users about various incompatible software (e.g. PPC applications, etc.). Of course at that time Apple probably didn’t know about the WD software issues. BUT>>>> by the time Apple released 10.9.1, Apple must have known about the issue of WD software repartitioning external hard drives. WD had already released a pubic statement to that effect.

 

So at the very least, Apple missed an opportunity to protect users updating to 10.9.1 by scanning their boot partition and warning them about any WD software found causing possible external drive problems BEFORE updating to 10.9.1.

The problem with that is it is only the OS installer that scans for incompatible software. At present, there is no code in the OS updaters for that.  It might be possible to add that capability to the updaters, but it isn't as simple as identifying & moving PPC apps to the incompatible software folder since the WD software installs system level components (like the launch daemons) as well as the applications, support files, etc. That added capability would have to be tested to make sure it works as intended & doesn't cause any other problems. All that takes time, & it is hard to know if Apple could do that given the relatively short interval between the discovery of the problem & the release of the 10.9.1 update.

Of course, it is certainly worth sending Apple feedback about that. It won't help with this issue but maybe it will with some future one.

Drew Reece wrote:

Isn't the same true of Flash and Java? They were allowed by the user at install time and now Apple blocks them.

Yes, OS X blocks those items, but they are just plugins & as mentioned here, even so Apple had to update the web plug-in-blocking mechanism to do that. Blocking the system level parts of the WD software utilities would probably require another, potentially more complex, update.

Both of the above are good ideas that I think Apple should hear about, but neither is something that can be implemented using the existing mechanisms built into the OS.

R C-R wrote:

The problem with that is it is only the OS installer that scans for incompatible software. At present, there is no code in the OS updaters for that.  It might be possible to add that capability to the updaters, but it isn't as simple as identifying & moving PPC apps to the incompatible software folder since the WD software installs system level components (like the launch daemons) as well as the applications, support files, etc. That added capability would have to be tested to make sure it works as intended & doesn't cause any other problems. All that takes time, & it is hard to know if Apple could do that given the relatively short interval between the discovery of the problem & the release of the 10.9.1 update.

 

Of course, it is certainly worth sending Apple feedback about that. It won't help with this issue but maybe it will with some future one.

 

Actually I'd prefer that Apple did NOT try to atomagically remove anything. I'd rather that Apple just notified users of potential problems like these WD drivers and make suggestions of appropriate user actions.

But this is counter to Apple's apparant trend w.r.t. OSX system and application updates. In my opinion, Apple is mistakenly trying to make  OS X more like iOS e.g. rapid/automatic system and application updates. This works pretty well in the "walled garden" ecosystem that has made iOS very popular with users who just "want things to work". But Apple doesn't control the still much wilder OS X ecosystem like it does iOS.

Thankfully, OS X users can still install applications, etc. that are not on the Mac App Store, etc. (e.g. EtreCheck). But they also take on the responsibility to manage their Macs during system/application updates. All I'm suggesting is that Apple should give them a hand, instead of stting on it's hands and remaining slient on issues like the ones being discussed in this thread.

FWIW I've set Notifications to Do Not Disturb (23 hours and 59 min), to stop the nagging. I'll update to 10.9.1 when I'm confident that 10.9.1 didn't introduce any other problems.

--GetRealBro

CALLOHANh wrote:

 

pete and ponti conniving possibly waiting for rcr to back them up.

 

I feel an all out assalt coming

Have i no friends here ?

Please consider that we are all just users like yourself. We can't force Apple or WD to go back in time & do anything differently. All we can do is try to help you better understand how & why this happened & what you can do about it, now & in the future.

I, & I assume every other user, agree with you 100% that it would be wonderful if Apple, WD, & every other developer could warn users in advance about any possible problems upgrading the OS could cause. But that just isn't practical in the real world, for the reasons several of us have mentioned.

That isn't an assault on you or anybody else. It is just the reality of an imperfect situation we all have to live with. We did not cause it, nor can we change it. All we can do is offer the best advice we have about how to cope with it.

A big part of that is being aware that anything we install that didn't come from Apple may not be fully compatible with anything that did. That means keeping track of what we have installed, being cautious about installing anything we don't need, making multiple backups of everything important to us, & not trusting Apple or anybody else to warn us about everything that could go wrong.

GetRealBro wrote:

Actually I'd prefer that Apple did NOT try to atomagically remove anything. I'd rather that Apple just notified users of potential problems like these WD drivers and make suggestions of appropriate user actions.

A good idea in theory but in practice anything that doesn't come from Apple & installs any system level software is a potential source of problems. The WD software doesn't even install a driver or other kernel extension (kext) file, just a couple of launch daemons, & we have seen how that can cause problems.

So if Apple did this, every time a user installed anything that included any kind of system level file, the notice would pop up. That is relatively common so I suspect users would just end up ignoring it if it is something they want to use.

My Seagate SATA ll external has gone belly up after the 10.9.1 update. Related to the update... iDunno

SeeHole wrote:

 

gone belly up

what do you mean, exactly?

Hello guys, again. Is it safe now (I'm sure some of you checked) to install Mavericks when I've completely removed any WD software?

If the WD software is the only cause of the problem, then yes.

I had removed the WD software completely and installed 10.9.1 for about a week. So far so good. But I have to run it for a few more weeks before I can feel a bit more secured.

Ok. Let me know if something bad happens, please.

Thanks, forgottendiary, this solved my problem on a My Passport WD 1 Tb drive with a single partition. After an entire morning of Time Machine telling me it couldn't back up to it; system Utilities telling me it couldn't eject the Passport because something was still using it; Disk Utilities telling me I need to verify the disk (but sorry, you can't, so repair it); but sorry you can't repair it because it's corrupt and has to be reformatted; and finally that it couldn't reformat it because it couldn't read the last sector.

Tried your method and the whole thing ran automatically and was done in 5 minutes.