Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Herrr Hecht 

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

Any solution?

Solution to loss of metadata, no.  It is gone.

Did you have another copy of said HD mirrored on another HD(s)?

Yes, I have second HD from My WD Studio II  2x2TB

I scanned only one HDD with an external SATA adapter (via USB2) on Windows 7 (Parallels)

If you have a redundant copy of what you lost good news,

....attach the good copy to a Mac running Mountain Lion and copy all data to the corrupted HD array (or to another set).

Quickly establish a redundant copy of your remaining single uncorrupted copy (not via Mavericks however).

Honais wrote:

 

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.

@Honais

Can you please detail what you've done on your MBP running mtn. Lion?

@Gochugogi

You say you haven't encountered the problem. As a matter of interest, are all your external disks part of the Spotlight indexing feature? Have you explicitely excluded them in the Spotlight preference pane?

Gochugogi wrote:

 

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...

Message was edited by: Basilic

I don't use Spotlight so I'm not sure how to disable it. I just clicked on the preferences link and I see a list of 15 catagories, all checked. So I'm guessing it indexed something as Time Machine and OWC external boot automatically with the Mac. The 2 LaCie drives are mounted only when I need them (a few times a week).

Basilic wrote:

 

@Gochugogi

 

You say you haven't encountered the problem. As a matter of interest, are all your external disks part of the Spotlight indexing feature? Have you explicitely excluded them in the Spotlight preference pane?

 

 

Gochugogi wrote:

 

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...

 

Message was edited by: Basilic

@Gochugogi

Is there anything listed in the Privacy tab of the Spotlight pref pane?

Nope, the Privacy tab is completely blank.

@Gochugogi

OK. When you checked, was your external disk connected?

If not - and if you agree - plug it, let it mount and be visible in the Finder, and check again the Privacy tab in the Spotlight Pref pane.

I explicitely put an external disk in that tab. I can only see it listed when it is mounted. If you eject the disk, that list will be empty.

Yes, my Time Machine (WD) and OWC external are mounted whenever my Mac is on. The other two drives I eject after use since I don't need them much. Like I wrote, I don't bother with Spotlight and haven't touched any of the options or preferences. Everything is at Apple defaults.

By the way, why has apple yet to stop spreading this version? External drive data loss isn't a joke.

ciu5781 wrote:

 

By the way, why has apple yet to stop spreading this version? External drive data loss isn't a joke.

So you are trolling over here now as well with you uninformed comments. Try reading the threads  before making stupid statements. There is good information and helpful information being collected and posted on these thread, so please stop embarrasing yourself and insulting other users.

Cheers

Pete

WD (Western Digital) Drives problem with Mavericks:

I work with several WD MyBook Studio II -- one 4TB Raid0 drive went down immediately after upgrading to Mavericks and lost all TM backups of my iMac.  After this, trying to restore the functionallity of TM, I followed the instructions from WD support asking to remove all WD Raid Manager which was necesary to initially set up the RAID choice for the myStudio units --  I did not have the WD DriveManager installed (I NEVER install drive manager software from drive vendors).  Losing the TM backup was not a big deal becasue is unlikely that the new OS 10.9 would allow rollbacks.

The other WD MyStudio II drive 6TB Raid0 did not fail after the OS upgrade. it had 3+TB of data with film and Photoshop projects and has never been used for backing up with TM  --  I have verified the drives with Disk Utility and all seems to be ok, but I am still waiting to hear from WD who promised to issue a new WD Raid Manager software version compatible with Mavericks. No news since the 5 of November - I will not buy WD drives again.

TIME MACHINE has a problem:

After Mavericks, Time Machine does not work reliably.

Still cannot restore the TM service properly:  even after verifying and reformatting the drive several times, every attempt to run TM  reports backups done after about 3 seconds (for a volume of 450GB) and ZERO KB on each backup directory. This error is recurrent and even Apple support didnt know how to fix - They now suggested the last resort to re-install Mavericks (currently 7-hours download time due to Apple servers overload).

I am now backing up using INTEGO backup software without Time Machine and the WD affected drive is working fine. (I read another thread reporting that TM was failing to backup even using the latest Apple TimeCapsule!)

PARTITION TABLE seems to be the problem:

However, another WD Passport Drive (2TB) was the next to fail.  This was holding TM backups from my MBP.  It worked ONCE after upgrading to Mavericks and then became impossible to even mount (message reported that the drive had not been ejected properly but this was not so).  In the end after so many failed attempst to mount, I connected the drive to a Windows-7 machine and tthis time at least I could see thte drive through Disk Manager.  I deleted the partitions and created a new one choosing GUID Partition table .   After this I could mount in the Mac and reformat.

What I have learnt so far:  

it seems that only the drives with the old Partition Table "Master Boot Record" (MBR) are failing or unreadable to Mavericks.  This was the Partition table used for presenving compatibility with older Windows XP and alike.  GUID Partition table works fine with Mavericks (I wish I had known this before!!!)  I had to do the same to a Lacie RUGGED 1TB USB3/Thunderbolt drive to work as good as ever. (copied data to a spare disc> reformatted using GUID Partition Table > copied the data back to the drive = no problem).

Also find impossible to read USB Flash Drives with old FAT32 format -- it seems these have to be formatted with exFAT to be able to work with Mavericks.

"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."

Thanks. Its always nice to have a control without problems when debugging.

My working hypothesis is that the problems of dismounting and remounting drives that i'm seeing is partially due to spotlight's penchant for indexing everything it can. And partially due to a flaw in how Mavericks dismounts drives.

After building and testing clean installs of Mavericks on our iMac and Macbook Pro using a external firewire and a bootable partition on the MacBook Pro, I was in the process of of cleaning up 6 Seagate GoFlex and Backup plus drives that had been used over the years with Time Machine when I began having problems dismounting and/or mounting the drives.

I religiously avoid Spotlight on externals. I always drag external drive icons to the privacy panel in Spotlight. But sometimes Spotlight begins indexing before I can open the Sys prefs. In these cases Mavericks will not allow me to drag the icon into the privacy panel and won't dismount the drive saying the drive is in use by some process. Since these drives have old Time Machine backups on them it would take Spotlight forever to index them. So I shut down the mac in order to disconnect the drive without forcibly ejecting it.

One of the quirks of the Seagate drives is the swapable drive interface. I have two Firewire bases and several USB 2 &  3 bases. I've been using the 2 firewire 800 bases while transferring/consolidating data on these 6 drives. And one of these drives has been attached via Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter. Perhaps my problems are mainly due to a flaw in Maverick's implementation of Firewire or Spotlight or both. Or maybe it is bigger than that. Thankfully I've been able to get to all the data, despite Maverick's dire warnings, by simply mounting the drives with Tiger or Snow Leopard.

--- GetReakBro

digitalsteel wrote:

 

... 

it seems that only the drives with the old Partition Table "Master Boot Record" (MBR) are failing or unreadable to Mavericks.  This was the Partition table used for presenving compatibility with older Windows XP and alike.  GUID Partition table works fine with Mavericks (I wish I had known this before!!!)....

I wish it were that simple for me.

I just unmounted a 1.5T Seagate GoFlex (attached via FW800 using a Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter) with a GUID paritiiton table and a single MacOS Extended (journaled) partition using the Maverick's Disk Utility and immediately tried to remount the partition -- it failed to mount as I've described in previous posts.

So I ejected the disk (using Maverick's Disk Utility) and restarted with the drive still attahced using my OSX 10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) boot partition on the my MacBook Pro's HD and guess what -- the very same drive could be mounted and unmounted at will using Snow Leopard's Disk Utility.

Note: the 1.5T Seagate drive has a single large .dmg file that I created last night to clone/archive an old Time Machine backup and make it portable.

-- GetRealBro