Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Barney-15E I actually was using Seagate Drives in a OWC enclosure.  No Western Digital Hardware at all and there is no Western Digital Software installed on my machine. My drive still got wiped.  This defintely isn't limited to Western Digital devices.  At least Western Digital have acknowledged the problem and made an effort to contact thier customers about it and in at least some cases offer solutions including data recovery software license keys.  Something that can not be said for Apple from whom there has been silence.

RogerOut wrote:

 

So  John Donne was wrong.  Who wudda thought.

Seems like it. Nice edit of my post to attempt to make your ramblings make some minacule of sense.

Fail.

Pete

Thankyou PlotinusVeritas the article https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031 is very helpful.

Anyone able to be successful like 'sussing it out' who is able to retrieve the data from booting via Windows and reading from MacDrive?

Regards,

Gordon

blindeyetom wrote:

 

Barney-15E I actually was using Seagate Drives in a OWC enclosure.  No Western Digital Hardware at all and there is no Western Digital Software installed on my machine. My drive still got wiped.  This defintely isn't limited to Western Digital devices.  At least Western Digital have acknowledged the problem and made an effort to contact thier customers about it and in at least some cases offer solutions including data recovery software license keys.  Something that can not be said for Apple from whom there has been silence.

Then perhaps it is not the software, but the firmware in the controller. OWC did have some problems with Mavericks with some of their RAID or NAS products (can't remember), but I think it only caused kernel panics. I'm not sure why Apple would say anything about a third-party product.

After Deleting the WD hidden files I can connect an external hard drive and it does not get corrupted!

I used Data Rescue 3 to recover over 400 GB of material: over 2000 video files, Hundreds of image files. It appears to be a near complete recovery of info.

I am going to try the Stellar Pheonix program on the smaller drive to see if that can recover the Meta Data on that disk. If it does I will retun to 1st larger disk and run it on that one.

I am debating whether or not to remove 10.9. (I had no real reason to upgrade in the first place other than it was available). If I have 1 more issue it is gone.

Lesson learned... Lesson Learned!

petermac87 wrote:

 

RogerOut wrote:

 

So  John Donne was wrong.  Who wudda thought.

Seems like it. Nice edit of my post to attempt to make your ramblings make some minacule of sense.

 

Fail.

 

 

 

Pete

Sorry.  I thought you'd understand it better if I kept the response to under 140 characters.

blindeyetom wrote:

 

Barney-15E I actually was using Seagate Drives in a OWC enclosure.  No Western Digital Hardware at all and there is no Western Digital Software installed on my machine. My drive still got wiped. 

So I wonder.  Maybe the update simply broke the RAID for some reason, and not anyone's fault per se?  Are you running software RAID, and what RAID schema?  It's pretty clear that WD's krapware has caused a lot of dataloss,  just wondering if you got bit differently.  ???

I wouldn't waste more than 140 characters answering your ill informed nonsense.

Cheers

Pete

I have a WD My Book, stripped of all WD provided software, connected to my Airport Extreme, 6th gen.  I have been up and running without any problems since the Mavericks release.  The only application that I am using is Time Machine and I am using the drive to back up three macs.

I have tested several Time Machine file recoveries and everything appears OK.

Am I at risk for some future failure?

As an editorial comment - I have always stayed with Western Digital drives going back to the IBM PC-XT.  I have yet to encounter a problem.  Not the greatest software in the world but the hardware is proven to be reliable.

I used a bare clean WD drive in my own enclosure and no issues with TM backup.  Any issues must be related to software or some all in one drive design.  Making my own has no issues.

Thanks to your suggestion I, too, called WD and got a key to use the Kroll software, in the hope that ity would restore files with filenames and intact folder structures. While scanning the big ED 6TB drive yesterday, the app locked up after 73%. Kroll tech informed that I had to start over, so I will give it another try.

  More distressing, I stopped a scan today, after 20 minutes; filenames and folder names did show up, so I copied a few image files - and they all appear to be damaged. Big .NEF and .JPG files. I'm hoping the next complete scan - if successful -  will yield good files.

   I have already completed one full scan using Data Rescue 3, but most but not all files have all been renamed. Many are damaged.

In the light of drives other than Western Digital, in the case of data corruption such as Seagate, [eliminating WD software contamination (still unproven)]....Western Digital is currently claiming akin to "our fault" in instances of data corruption.

Obviously WD could care less about drives other than their own regarding this occurrence,...what empirical evidence is present regarding absolute specificity as per WD software.

WD Community Manager "Bill"

"As long as you don't have WD SmartWare or WD Drive Manager on your computer, you should be fine"

for those who haven't seen same:

WD Software Uninstaller

• File Name: WD_Software_Uninstaller_1_0_0_8.zip

This is the info on my hardware as it was when the issue occured:

iMac

27 inch mid 2011

3.4 GHz Intel Core i7

16 GB 1333 Mhz DDR3 RAM

HD Enclosue

Mercury Rack Pro http://eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/MRP1UF8U3EP/

Connected to iMac via Firewire 800 (DAS, no daisy chaining)

Hardware RAID (Configured to RAID 5)

Drives

Seagate 4TB FW: CC52 (x4)

No other drives were attached to the computer at the time. No software from WD or anyone else being used as a RAID controller. Hardware RAID only (so yes it could be an issue with the firmware in the enclosure)

Here's what happened: After installing 10.9 on my iMac the RAID (which I had named 12TB RAID) showed up with 2 partitions, one an EFI partition and the other named as MyBook. It was displaying the entire drive with it's 12TB capacity as blank. The fact that the drive mounted with 2 partitions and one of the partitions was named Mybook is strange, as that is Western Digital's designation and as I say, I have no WD software on my machine.

I since plugged the drive into a Macbook Pro running 10.8.5 where the drive showed up on the desktop as just the MyBook partition, again 12TB of free space.  The EFI partition does not show up as mounted on the desktop.  Running a quick scan on the drive with Data Recovery Software showed there is at least some data on the drive somewhere. Rather than go through the whole scan and recover process I cancelled the scan and ejected the drive.

To clarify, there is no 3^rd party RAID controller software on either my iMac or my Macbook Pro.  No Western Digital software at all. No OWC software.  I'm using hardware RAID only.  I've contacted both Apple and OWC about this and both are investigating the issue.

I do use Western Digital drives, but not in this case. I've never installed any WD software on my machine but I do wonder if somewhere one of my WD drives had managed to discretely install some kind of device driver or something on my machine that migh have played a hand in what happened.  If anyone knows how to find out if that is possible and if so if it in fact is part of the problem, that would be great.

So far, the response I've had from Apple is that it may be possible that Mavericks is somehow showing the drive as empty, when in fact the data is all still there, rather than the fact that Mavericks formatted the drive. The possibility being that some instruction has been written to the drive to display it as blank.  Though he couldn't give me much more precise info on that as he said the engineering team are still investigating.

I'm pushing at the limits of my computer knowledge here, but I vaguely understand that an EFI partition would include some of this sort of info on how the drive shows up when attached to a computer, is that correct?  If so, might the fact that Mavericks has done something to the drive to alter the way it shows up (i.e. as a blank drive) explain why the EFI partition initially showed up alongside the Mybook partition, and why the drive now shows as blank when plugged into a computer that does not have Mavericks installed?

I was advised not to attempt any data recovery yet as there may be a solution whereby it would be possible to set the drive to show the data properly.  This was presented as the best case scenario.  Worst case scenario being that the drive has in fact been somehow formatted by Mavericks and rebuilding from back ups and carrying out data recovery is my only option.

blindeyetom wrote:

 

Thankyou PlotinusVeritas the article https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031 is very helpful.

Yes, tons of great info in that article!

It sounds like a lot to process, but developing a backup routine and setting an archiving schedule is not really that difficult.  Time Machine was a brilliant first-move to help users.  Those of us who are dealing with expensive data, like client data, TM is often not nearly enough. 

We've been exposed to the idea of RAID, but as the author of that article emphasizes, the hard disk (or RAID) in your production machine is not a "copy" of anything.  It's better to consider that the drives you use on a daily basis will fail at some point.  With a backup and archive strategy, the worst case is you will lose your production drive(s) but never lose important data, except for that window of time where you didn't copy data to a backup. That risk level is different for everyone.

RAID is simply not a very good option for the vast majority of us.  It's another layer of complexity that can fail.  The drives are often noisy, especially if you're running 10k RPM drives - which petty much demands that they run in a cold, or cool room. Updating an OS can be a nightmare with a RAID attached.  RAID makes sense in larger production environments where professionals can monitor and maintain them, and the servers can reside in a cold room.  (Ever worked in a cold room for hours on end?  I have.  It *****!)

For those of us running more sophisticated systems at a small office or home office, buying high quality drives and instituting thoughtful backup and archiving routines, will benefit with securing important data without the hassle and complexity of RAID.