Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

pablotravel  &

forgottendiary & aaronkine

That's great you resolved that!  I'm eager to try that but before I do I'll send that info to the Apple tech support guy I've been dealing with. I'm still paranoid about plugging drives into my Macs at the moment.  I'll let you know if that solution is one I try and if it works for me.  Thanks for sharing!  Can I ask if you had just a drive mount problem or if you had the repartitioning as Mybook & EFI problem as well?

And RogerOut thanks for the apology.  And for the positive contributions.  And by the way I hate iTunes with a passion. I even paid for iExplorer so I could bypass iTunes when plugging in my iOS devices. http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/

I just have unmounted partitions, one with an strange name and the other with the name I put it.

EFI problem? The keyboard? That got fix for me with the last update.

pablotravel One of the issues is the apparant repartioning of Hard Drives.  EFI is a partition designation that is showing up when some Hard Drives are being plugged in to the computer.  For example, I had a RAID array which I had named 12TB_RAID and after the OS upgrade to Mavericks it was renamed as MyBook and also showed the additional EFI partition.  In any case, glad that solution worked for you!

@blindeyetom

I was having drive mount and unmount problems. Let us know what tech support says.

To forgottendiary

Don't get me wrong. As per your screenshot, it seems that the Volumes folder is listing only your system disk. Is that correct that for this trick, you have your external disk physically unplugged? Or the disk was plugged in but the volume dismounted? Could you please be more precise?

GaryB wrote:

 

My drives are connected via a Firewire daisy chain.Whilst I believe PlotinusVeritas is correct, and the reason I moved my WD drives to a backup only role last year, the irony is that it is my GTech that now thinks it is a 'MyBook', and my two WD drives are (mostly) working. So somehow it seems the WD software has hijacked my GTech?

Disconnecting the chain and leaving only the GTech does nothing to help.

Yeah Im having the exact same issue here.

@Basilic

My ext HD was unplugged when I did this.

When you connect any ext HD, it's mounted under /Volumes. So by adding the entire /Volumes folder into Spotlight's privacy tab, any ext HD you plugin afterwards won't get indexed.

Hope this clarifies.

forgottendiary 

So by adding the entire /Volumes folder into Spotlight's privacy tab, any ext HD you plugin afterwards won't get indexed.

Its completely sensible that this is causative since Mavericks core overhaul point was spotlight/finder

If Mavericks is trying to Meta-tag connected external HD data (RAID or otherwise) and there is either a partition structure, or software (WD) interference,...I can easily see problems.

Just a logical hypothesis,.......given the broad-spectrum nature of HD affected (certainly not just WD RAID or WD software related), that this all stems to a possible OpenMeta fault.

Since MOST ALL of these reports of data corruption boil down to the complete loss of user defined meta-data, and that metadata is stored in extended attributes [Xattr],...Spotlight indexer may be initiated to add to (corrupt) the database for spotlight, letting it become searchable but ends up being corrupted.

Since openmeta uses setxattr()/getxattr(),......the question for the "Coders" is how is this causing a data corruption fault on external HD with Mavericks finder/spotlight?

Glad I found this thread as was about to buy a new WD Studio II drive (plus as it seems the most read/watched). I own three of these WD drives already from FW400 to FW800 Studios. I have upgraded one of our Macs to Mavericks but not connected it to a drive yet, I will wait to UG the other Macs until this has a concrete answer.

Please though, can someone answer if I were to buy a new drive (regardless of brand/enclosure/firmware) and formatted it's partitions (Ext Journaled) under Mavericks with Apple Disk Utility, would this then work OK? Has anyone any thoughts/knowledge here?

There seems to be a lot of WD bashing vs love here too. I should point out I'm not a WD fanboy but they have never let me down and I hear the new Seagate enclosures are noisy. Had GDrives and LaCie before too but have now stuck with WD over these.

Additionally why did Apple ditch FW completely? It was plenty fast enough and now we have to buy an adapter or a new TBolt drive, right? Plus the sodding cables are nearly £40! So if I don't want to shell out this ridiculous price for a simple cable, I'm forced back to crappy USB then....

Thanks for reading.

2Leigh wrote:

 

 

 

Please though, can someone answer if I were to buy a new drive (regardless of brand/enclosure/firmware) and formatted it's partitions (Ext Journaled) under Mavericks with Apple Disk Utility, would this then work OK? Has anyone any thoughts/knowledge here?

 

I don't think anyone can answer that at this point with certainty.  You should simply wait until this has been resolved and Apple has released a fix for Mavericks.

Or, go ahead and be a test subject and let us know how it goes.

2Leigh 

Please though, can someone answer if I were to buy a new drive (regardless of brand/enclosure/firmware) and formatted it's partitions (Ext Journaled) under Mavericks with Apple Disk Utility, would this then work OK?

Additionally why...ditch FW completely?

Firewire in general is less than half as fasts as USB3, and the cables are far cheaper to mfg.

Before Mavericks, during, and after, its all about redundancy, all HD are fragile, SSD or conventional. HD are cheap as dirt, your vital work data, stuff you made, saved, are working on is far far more valuable than buying an extra $70 hard drive or two.

Just backup and archive your vital data you "dont dare lose" on a nice Toshiba or Hitachi, Seagate 1, or 2TB drive and disconnect it. 

Nothing can be corrupted that isnt connected (outside of mechanical /ferromagnetic failure obviously).

Archive data to drive A, disconnect it.....archive data connected all the time to drive B.....at intervals connect one at a time and archive vital data then disconnect it.

By backup I refer to data backups and archives, not a Time Machine backup.

Speed chart USB2, USB3, FW,  Thunderbolt  with conventional 7200RPM HD.   All speeds are ultimately limited by platter and spindle speed and start-up revs.

After two weeks I've been forced to give up on. Mavericks - I was having issues with Adobe premiere, audition and later After Effects and losing functionality if I tried to import from an external HDD. I then found my external drives (gtech and LaCie) were unmounting and I had to reset the PRAM - once a week then more frequently.

I then began to find that my adobe apps were begin to corrupt and then when I talked to adobe today, I discover that apple have apparently changed the QuickTime codecs without telling us.

I've been up all night, I've lost at least week while I tried to work this out and I'm going going to be up all night tonight reinstalling all my software.

Lets just say that I'm not a happy camper.

Oh, and  I've just had to buy my second new hard drive in  a week.

OK, just ordered a new 2TB USB3 WD Passport for Mac (as I wanted something portable too). Once I reformat it and use it I'll report back with any issues I find (or not). Though it's not turning up until next Weds. Thanks PlotinusVeritas& RogerOutfor the responses.

Hello,

I am Italian but I think I have the same problem.

Last day...my seagate barracuda 2000 GB isn't recognize from my Imac (with Maverick....)

I tried to all software to recover the files inside.

Nothing.

I have the voyager Q from NewerTech.

The hard disk start....2 second..and after nothing.

So..I ask you if there is something to do to recover the files.

I have to wait something from Seagate or Apple ?

Thanks to all of you to help me

Silvio