Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Leigh,

It will be fine because the firewire models have the issues.  The USB 2.0/3.0 are working fine

Unfortunately not for me.

I plugged in a G-Tech 500 GB drive, through USB 3, in my brand new retina mbp (2.6 ghz / 1TB / 16Gb) running mavericks and it corrupted the drive while formatting in disk utility. Was able to salvage on secondary MBP running mtn. Lion.

Oh no!  

FYI:  I had drives erased that were external & internal eSATA, USB2/3, and firewire 800 (early MacPro 2009 with Mavericks). 

So I had just used my early 2011 MacBook Pro running a clean install of Mavericka to copy 800+GB of data to a partition on a freshly partitioned 3T Seagate Go Flex via firewire 800 and unmounted it via the Mavericks Disk Utility when I remembered that I hadn't checked the remaining space. So I just click the mount button to remount it. And disk utility told me that it could not mount the drive and that I should verify and repair the volume. Which I dutifully did and the log read...

2013-11-13 17:06:49 -0600: Verify and Repair volume “Seagate 3T”

2013-11-13 17:06:49 -0600: Starting repair tool:

2013-11-13 17:06:49 -0600: Checking file system

2013-11-13 17:06:49 -0600: Volume repair complete.

2013-11-13 17:06:49 -0600: Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

2013-11-13 17:08:33 -0600: Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

2013-11-13 17:08:33 -0600:

2013-11-13 17:08:33 -0600: Disk Utility stopped repairing “Seagate 3T”: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

So (after uttering copious swear words) I shut down the MacBook Pro and attached the Seagate 3T drive to my trusty PowerBook G4 running the last truly robust version of OS X -- 10.4.11 and.... well,  the disk mounted without any problems! The data was all there. And just to prove it to myself, I copied all the data to yet another Seagate external drive.

The moral of this story is... Always keep a computer running (or at least bootable drive or partition) of the last stable version of an OS when you upgrade.

--- GetRealBro

p.s. IMHO Mavericks is simply not yet capable of reliably dealing with external drives regardless of "brand" or interface.

I may be a bit naive here but is there anywhere where Apple has officially acknowledged this problem, and does Apple keep users informed as to what they may be doing to address the problem, and when it might possibly be fixed???  Thanks,  bj

beejaysoo wrote:

 

I may be a bit naive here but is there anywhere where Apple has officially acknowledged this problem, and does Apple keep users informed as to what they may be doing to address the problem, and when it might possibly be fixed???  Thanks,  bj

Most OS 10.9 users are not having problems with external drives so I don't think Apple is going to issue a all-points-bulletin to warn the masses. Whatever unfortunate conflict with FW, drives, apps and/or OS is well represented here, but not common. I updated my three Macs to 10.9 on day one and, now over 3 weeks out, none of my external drives have exhibited any of the data problems written about on this forum. My Mini actually has a WD (time machine), OWC (image files) and LaCie (image backup) externals. My iMac has a LaCie Raid and my Mac Pro a Seagate. I'm sure whatever the software conflict is, it will be silently fixed in OS 10.9.1 and no mention will be made of it...

BTW Maverick's inability to unmount external drives/volumes cleanly and the Maverick Disk Utility's inability to repair the problem is very repeatable. Luckily, so is the ability of previous stable OS X releases to mount these "corrupted" disks/volumes without any drama. For example, the bootable partition of Snow Leopard (10.6.8) on my MacBook Pro, mounts and reads the disks/volumes that the Maverick Disk Utility says is not repairable. Sorry I don't know about 10.7 or 10.8 -- I gave both of these versions a miss.

-- GetRealBro

"I updated my three Macs to 10.9 on day one and, now over 3 weeks out, none of my external drives have exhibited any of the data problems written about on this forum. My Mini actually has a WD (time machine), OWC (image files) and LaCie (image backup) externals. My iMac has a LaCie Raid and my Mac Pro a Seagate"

That's interesting. Roughly how many times have you unmounted and remounted these drives/volumes since updating to Mavericks?

-- GetRealBro

For anyone here asking if their drives will be fine - don't count on it.  Basically the lesson here is that is probably best to not update to Mavericks - at least not yet. If you are not obsessive about backing up your data, then get obsessive about backing up your data.  If you do update to Mavericks, make sure you don't plug anything into the machine that contains data that is not backed up. If you have ever used a Western Digital drive, make sure you run the Western Digital uninstaller.  Don't install any 3rd party drive controller software.

I just got an 'we're still looking into the problem' email from Apple.  Still waiting..

Where can we find this Western Digital uninstaller you speak of, just curious/

I mount dismount all my drives daily. The WD was originally a clone of my Mini's system drive and when I thought 10.0 was safe, I reformed it and switched it to Time Machine duty. I cloned the 3TB OWC full of images to the LaCie once or twice a week and immediately dismount the LaCie after the clone operation. I shutdown the Macs nightly and restart in the morning and the externals always appear when I boot up. I have bootable system drive clones a G-Drive, WD Mobile and LaCie Porche for the three Mac, all kept offline except when updating. I think that's a total of 9 external drives. This forum made me parinoid so I've been updating my offsite backups weekly.

With that said, OS 10.9 hasn't been perfect and that's why I bothered to read these forums. I had to switch my work drives to USB 2 because the FW bus won't sleep and the drives were really hot at the end of the day. I have an old 500MB LaCie drive with only FW400 so I have to dismount and manually turn it off to prevent overheating. Other than than, 10.9 is great! All my legacy software works perfectly: CS5 Creative Suite, Bias Peak Pro, Office 2008 and even Quicken 2007. The only app that "broke" was a very ancient Toast 7 (it's up to 11 now).

GetRealBro wrote:

 

"I updated my three Macs to 10.9 on day one and, now over 3 weeks out, none of my external drives have exhibited any of the data problems written about on this forum. My Mini actually has a WD (time machine), OWC (image files) and LaCie (image backup) externals. My iMac has a LaCie Raid and my Mac Pro a Seagate"

 

That's interesting. Roughly how many times have you unmounted and remounted these drives/volumes since updating to Mavericks?

 

-- GetRealBro

WD Software Uninstaller

Pete

what about the "Drive Unlocker" software that comes on the My Passport Studio drives?

I have the same problem with WD MyBook Studio II

under RAID 1 - 2x2 TB via Firewire 800

formatted HFS+ (journaled) on iMac 27" mid 2011 with WD Utilities

Same here after UPGRADING to OS X Mavericks

faa....

I scanned the hard drive using R-Studio:

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Data_Recovery_Download.shtml

After deep-scan (28 h.) this program has found all my 3,000,000 files.

Videos MOV, Photos RC2, JPEG with Exif But!!

..there is no file names or structures of folders.

Any solution?

Please, please help me!!

WD — never.. never never never never never never never never again!!