Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Oh, sorry.   It mounted right away.

I didn't install any WD software.  I just reformatted it with Disc Utility the first time I attached it.

however this thread, alas, is being  used to report 4 diff. things,

1. MyBook / EFI 'corruption'

2. HD ejects

3. Firewire sleep issues (few)

4. endless HD indexing (ala fsck / spotlight)

Mac OS Mavericks cannot cause this problem, as stated 10 pages ago.

Mavericks cannot place "Mybook" on the partitioned HD (or 'corrupted' HD), this designation belongs to Western Digital and doesnt exist anywhere in Mavericks.

What users report ON their HD after corruption (MyBook) doesnt exist in Mac OS, Mavericks or otherwise.

There is no issue with any physical hard drive by ANY Mfg., .... said that on page 1 of this thread.

Hard drives: work and run..., fail and crash, spin and shuttle data on command,...they dont format or partition themselves, never was that the case.

Unless needed for a RAID array, all HD control software is garbageware, ...always has been.

Its fluffy nonsense some HD mfg. (WD and Seagate) peddle with their drives in hopes to sell more X drives than Brand-Y drives. 

Nothing good or helpful comes about by or from use of HD software.

people for years here have said (and elsewhere):

1. A new HD is a brick, remove from package, format it, then use it.

2. Never ever never  install HD software.

IBM technicians were screaming doom and gloom about fragile ferromagnetic data storage 20 years ago.           Back when hard drives cost as much as a new car costs.

Apple's terms of use in activating any computer (same as all other computer mfg.) state clearly "not responsible for loss of data"

WD was not proactive in testing its wares with OS 10.9, and claimed on its own website "10.9 compatible",.....well it wasnt.

If you only have one copy of your priceless data off the computer, youre running with scissors on the edge of an active volcano,      its a tragedy that will, without fail, unfold itself.

"An external hard drive is a device used to backup your other two external hard drives, because you should not trust any of them,...they all want to betray you"  - Rules of data management   S. Slagowski

B (WD-ware) causing A (fsck command) when on platform C (Mavericks), 

or A causing B on platform C

Known --    A fault B,   or B fault A   not occurring on platform D and E (ML and Lion)

WD-ware (B) is forcing A to perform false command,... there is no logical likelihood that a false A is causing B to fault the HD, (open to correction)

1. One or more aspects of WD-ware is/was (dependent upon version) Mavericks incompatible

2. Once resident in Mavericks, the WD-ware can/is possible of cross-populating this fault to any HD,....WD, Seagate or otherwise

3. Indications of fsck commands in conjunction with WD-ware ON Mavericks causing repartitioning / corruption.

4. fsck commands in conjunction with WD-ware ON Lion & Mountain Lion had no such occurrence.

ergo, B fault A-as-C-resident = current issue

B fault A-as-D-or-E-resident  = not possible

Resolution:    remove B on C-resident,

Avoidance:    format all new HD,   never install B

That the WD Drive Manager can: re-initialized the drive and overwrite the partition table

(which is the premise of this thread)

Plotinus,

Great post, sir. But you are a voice crying in the wilderness. Thick heads and osterich-like behavior prevail here. It's always someone else's fault for loss of data.

Hello All,

I'd like to share what happened to me and how I fixed it.

I bought my first Mac the day Mavericks came out. Being brand new to OS X, I downloaded Mavericks first thing when I got home. I didn't have any problems for two months until I read a thread about how I should verify and repair my external hard drives using Disk Utility. My drives had worked fine until that day. I have four of them. Two are Western Digital Elements, 2TB and 3TB. The other two are older Maxtor One Touch4 drives, 500GB, and 1TB. When I ran the Disk Utility verify and repair, the two WD drives went through without a problem and actually seemed to act a little faster, so I moved on to the Maxtors. Both of them ran through the verification ok but the repair is when things seemed to go wrong. The drive was still there but the partition was grayed out, just like most people here have already said. Luckily I found this thread.

I had yet to read that somebody had a problem with an older Maxtor drive. It also seemed to be that most drives affected were of a larger capacity, 3TB and up. My case ended up being the opposite of most posts here.

It drove me nuts thinking that my computer could see the drives but not mount them. I was pretty sure the info was still on the drives. So I figured I would try to plug them into an old Dell laptop running Windows XP I had laying around. I ended up getting an error code, "drive is not accessible, the file or directory is corrupt or unreadable". So I Googled the error code and found a thread that told how to fix your drive using the Windows cmd prompt. I figured I had nothing to lose.

Start->

Run->

cmd->

chkdsk /f e:    ("e" was what my drive was labeled in MY Computer)

enter

It ran through a series of verification phases which took between 5 and 10 minutes for each drive.

But when it was done, the original Maxtor One Touch icons were back in My Computer. The larger 1TB drive was completely back 100%. The smaller 500GB drive had all of it's folders, but said I did not have sufficient access to open them. So I headed back to Google to find out how to take back ownership of my drive.

I had to run my laptop in safe mode and right click on the drive in My Computer. From there,

Properties->

Security->

Advanced->

Owner->

Edit which user you want to take control, I checked the box at the bottom that said "replace owner on subcontainers and objects". This changed the ownership to all the folders within the drive.

When I was done I plugged it back into my Mac. Both Maxtors mounted and all the info was there 100%. I then unmounted them using Disk Utility because I don't dare keep any of my externals plugged in anymore.

I am not very good with computers so I hope I'm not rambling on too much or making it too simplified. I just really hope this info is useful to some people whether they get their drive back or someone can make sense of what I did to cause and or fix this. Thank you to everyone who has posted on this thread, you have all been a big help to someone who knew next to nothing about

OS X when this all started. Other than this whole external hard drive thing, I wish I had switched to a Mac years ago, I'm really enjoying it!

My two cents.

Very often people do not realize that their external drives have problems such as bad blocks. OSX can not get SMART data from most external drives without the manufacturer's drivers.  There is a wonderful free driver,

called SAT Smart Driver. which I recommend to all my clients support.

     This is a kernel driver for Mac OS X external USB or FireWire drives.

It extends the standard driver behaviour by providing access to drive SMART data. The interface to SMART data is same as with ATA family driver, so most existing applications should work. The driver requires a SAT (SCSI ATA Translation) capable external drive enclosure.

Most programs including disk utility will show the SMART status of your hard drive and you can learn about the existing problems with the disk than before they become critical.

Also recommend and programs that can do a backup of the file structure of the disc (techtools, diskdrill ...)

If your disk becomes unreadable your chance to recover your data will increase.

Open a terminal and look for suspicious log record, it may look something like this: disk1s2: I/O error

This string tells you about the problems with the disk even if it does not show SMART driver.

And most importantly - make backups :-)

Make a local copy, make a copy in the cloud...

Regards,

Alex Chernenko

Apple Support Professional

Alex.Chernenko 

And most importantly - make backups :-)

Make a local copy, make a copy in the cloud...

None of what you just stated has anything to do what was going on here regarding 3rd party HD controllers from WD.

the cloud (anonymous server farms) are NOT to be trusted

backups? here I wrote this:

Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection

Peace

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

None of what you just stated has anything to do what was going on here regarding 3rd party HD controllers from WD.

possibly, but we see a lot of reports of problems with drives from other manufacturers.

I watched a few problems in my users often with WD when you upgrade to Maverics with WD-ware as well as without these drivers as well. Very often problems with external drives users notice only when the disc stops working normally.

I take these disks from disk enclosure and connect directly to my macpro and very often they have a problem with SMART.

That's why I wrote a small faq monitoring external drives here.

Regards,

Alex Chernenko

Apple Support Professional

Same problem on a WD Elements 2GB, formatted with Fat32 for Windows compatibility. Fortunately the drive can be read on a Windows machine, although with a warning about corruption. So far the drive had always been connected to Macs.

Thank you for that tip Alex. It works great with my WD MyBook Studio II and should provide very useful in diagnosing anymore of these issues in the future.

I have been following this thread since the beginning and have persponed installing Mavericks saving myself a lot of digital pain in the process. So thanks everyone.

After searching the web for hours and trying everything I finally found the answer to this.

I have a MAC Book Pro and also have the WD Passport, it was working just the other day and now it wasn't.

I could hear it working and see the white light on but it was NOT showing up in devices but WAS showing up in disc utility.

Here's what I did;

With my WD Passport plugged in I went to;

FINDER

APPLICATIONS

DISC UTILITY

Click on the WD Passport  (in My case it said 1TB WD My Passport) at the left hand side so it's highlighted

Then click on FIRST AID in the middle section

then at the bottom right hand side click on VERIFY DISC

This gave me some errors that needed to be fixed, and then I clicked on REPAIR DISC and in a few minutes it was fixed.

Now, I don't know if this was a problem for you, but when I clicked below the 1TB WD My Passport where I named my passport "Modella2014" (you will have a different name obviously) in the bottom section it said  MOUNT POINT "not mounted"

So I went back up to "Modella2014" and right clicked (on the mac track pad that's a 2 finger click) and selected "Mount Modella2014" and in a few seconds that was mounted.

Hope this helps, feel free to share and save someone else the 4 hours it took me to figure this out. Now back to editing!

I believe I have the dirty fsck issue with my 2TB WD USB drive.  I partitioned it 1TB for TM and 1TB MSFAT for video storage that I could access via my Windows 7 desktop and rMBP.  It mounted/ejected quickly and flawlessly before Mavericks.  Just now for the 2nd time as I plugged it in for TM backup it reported TM unmounted and corrupted.  I have been having problem ejecting the HDD as well.  I ran Disk Utilities three times (worked before) and it failed completely.  I left it plugged in and found this thread.

As I am paging through this thread I see that the TM partioned mounted and begain backup.  The TM partition is full and it needs to clear space for the next one.

Is there still no fix for this issue?

The first thing I would do is detach the drive and make sure you do NOT have any WD software installed. The consequences of the WD software repartioning your drive is exponentially worse than the long fsck issue.

Once you've confirmed you do not have any WD software installed, open the Console utility and select the fsck_hfs log from the left hand pane. It's under Files > /var/log > fsck_hfs.log. You do NOT need ot have your WD drive attached to see if you have had the long fsck_hfs issue. It will have been captured in the log. Just scroll back looking for an fsck run that has more than 5 lines in it.

A good one looks like..

/dev/rdisk0s4: fsck_hfs started at Tue Jan 28 12:31:51 2014

/dev/rdisk0s4: /dev/rdisk0s4: ** /dev/rdisk0s4 (NO WRITE)

/dev/rdisk0s4:    Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-226.1.1).

QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN

/dev/rdisk0s4: fsck_hfs completed at Tue Jan 28 12:31:51 2014

A bad one looks like...

/dev/rdisk1s3: fsck_hfs started at Fri Dec 13 10:00:37 2013

/dev/rdisk1s3: /dev/rdisk1s3:    Executing fsck_hfs (version hfs-226.1.1).

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.

/dev/rdisk1s3:    The volume name is Seagate 3T

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking extents overflow file.

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking catalog file.

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking multi-linked files.

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking catalog hierarchy.

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking extended attributes file.

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking multi-linked directories.

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking volume bitmap.

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** Checking volume information.

/dev/rdisk1s3: ** The volume Seagate 3T appears to be OK.

/dev/rdisk1s3: fsck_hfs completed at Fri Dec 13 10:08:52 2013

Note the time stamps.

The Bad News: As far as I know there is no know fix for these long fsck runs. I was never able to discover the trigger that makes the file system dirty and causes the long fsck run

The Good News: It appears that the subsequent long fsck run fixes the dirty file system with no loss of data.

If a drive does not mount right away DO NOT UNPLUG THE DRIVE until you open the console and check the fsck_hfs.log.

---GetRealBro

Thank you, that is the information (checking fsck log) I was looking for last night.

I never use the manufacture utilties.  I double checked last night just in case and I am clear.

I am at work now but will be checking for the longer log and suspect I will find it as the symptoms you and others describe match mine.   I will put in a support call or email to Apple to see if there is any upcoming fix.  I will also look for a way of backing up my TM and use a 2nd source for backups just in case.

Thank you again.

hello,

I became today my new MyBook from the warranty service.

I don't know exactly watt to do now. Should i do any think before i plugged it in to my MacBook? Should i format it?

Thanks

I know you have posted before that you have already removed the WD software, but I would  double check that there is not any WD software installed on your MacBook. Then I would use Disk Utility to partion the drive as you wish.

There is no reason to doubt the new WD hardware, just don't install any of their software

---GetRealBro