Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Pete,

This is a discussion board where people discuss what they think. They don't always need to "Back it up"

Many people have lost very important data and are understandably frustrated.

As for me, I have not because the valuable info on this board convinced me to hold off.

So please stop with the useless posts ( like your response to me ) as it adds no information to the topic.

And, if you don't like the speculation please move on to a more factual discussion.

Curt

You should really go back and read the Terms Of Use you should have read when your agreed to them upon joining these forums. The section on not speculating may be of interest. If you do not like the answers to your posts then ignore them unless, as I say, you are going to back up the statements you make. No good trying to weasel out of it by trying to blame others.

Cheers

Pete

petermac87

Please be kind and dont pick on users who are frustrated due to data loss, its a bit uncouth.  

Doesnt matter as to blame ultimately, data loss is data loss.

Assist,.. be helpful,.. suggestions for alternatives (backups /archives).

Dont 'rub salt in someone else's sore spot' 

Pete,

As I have said this discussion has been very valuable.

I have no problems with the responses.

Curt

Plotinus,

Well said!

Curt

Based on what I have read in various tech website posts and on this thread, it would seem that there are issues with Mavericks interacting with various HD controllers, software and firmware.  A conflict between Mavericks and the Western Digital software is most definitely to blame for the renaming/repartioning of drives to 'MyBook' & 'EFI' partitions.  Western Digital have admitted that of course.  But there are also the issues of drives mounting and unmounting incorrectly, not displaying etc that have been reported here.

According to the conversations I've had with Apple tech support they are working on the issue, with "we are still collecting data and assessing the situation" being the kind of response I've been getting in regards a fix.

What is frustrating (that's the kind word for it) to me is that a problem such as this was not picked up in beta testing (either by the HD manufacturers or Apple) and the OS was released with this major problem.  If it was picked up in beta testing then that is even more shocking.

While the WD software problem has been clearly identified, Mavericks is also part of that equation, especially if there are issues with external HD drives not related to WD software being reported here.  So reporting the problem to Apple as well as the manufacturer of the drive you have issues with is absolutely necessary. 

What is helpful on this thread is not so much the assigning of blame but the postings of the various problems people have been encountering and the attempts to find solutions. For example I thought my drive problems had nothing to do with any WD software as there was none installed in my Apps folder but thanks to a post on this thread by AKabas I found some WD files on my iMac I never knew existed.  I never installed this, and they never showed up in a spotlight search but lo and behold there they was in:

  /Library/Application Support (WDDriveManager)

  /Library/LaunchDaemons (com.wdc.drivemanagerservice.plist)

So I ran the WD uninstaller software - http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=124&sid=214&lang=en

That didn't reveal the data on my drive but at least I found the culprit.  It might be non Apple software and firmware that is a problem, but it's the way it's interacting with Apple's OS that's really the issue, and for that, the responsibility lies in part with Apple.

Just picking the user up on TOU he agreed to. These posts are helpful, this posters responses are not. They are speculation. You can reread the TOU as well if you wish.

Pete

Peter,

You must be a joy in board games.

Wish there was a way to filter folks like you.

I am done conversing with you.

Have a good evening (or morning) depending on where you live.

Curt

petermac87 wrote:

 

Just picking the user up on TOU he agreed to. These posts are helpful, this posters responses are not. They are speculation. You can reread the TOU as well if you wish.

 

Pete

In the past two pages, you've posted 6 times and within none of those is there any substantial information that is helpful in any way whatsoever.  So who's calling the kettle black?  Who appointed you the TOU enforcement officer?

"@GetRealBro

had 2 dirves fail to mount and become unrepairable immediately after they were unmounted by Disk Utility

Its not that unmounting was causation leading to repartitioning and data corruption, rather a unified sequence of unmounting--repartitioning--and data corruption is occurring from indications."

Please don't tar my Seagates with that WD brush :)

Seriously, I realize it is a stretch to link the unmount re-mount problems I've reported on Seagate drives and the repartitioning reported on WD drives. But the two problems may have a common root cause. Time will tell.

Two very big differences in the Seagate and WD problems is that I have not lost ANY data (yet) and I have been able to mount and copy the data off of these drives with previous versions of OSX.

Since I'm using Apple's drivers on a clean install of Mavericks, there are no 3rd party software excuses. The only non-apple bits are the physical drives, interface hardware and cables (both USB and FW800) which BTW have been working quite well when I was/am running 10.6.8.

My unmount/mount problems occurred when using Maverick's Disk Utility to unmount and immediately re-mount drives/volumes. I didn't touch the drives or cables. So there isn't even the excuse of clumsy handling of drives/cables.

As I posted before, I think Mavericks does not unmount drives/volumes correctly. It may be that Mavericks doesn't completely/correctly write that last data/directory buffer or it may not set various flags correctly or... Whatever Mavericks does do while unmounting a drive/partition, it SOMETIMES leaves the drive/partition in a condition that the Mavericks Disk Utility sees as unrepairable. Yet Snow Leopard's Disk Utility either doesn't see the problem or can easily fix it leaving the drive/volume mountable and readable.

FWIW, I just completed my last data extraction from these drives by creating a compressed read only .dmg of a 470ish GB Time Machine backup. And i've spot checked that I can recover data from it by asking TM to browse other TM disks :)

So i'll be quite now -- GetRealBro

blindeyetom wrote:

 

What is frustrating (that's the kind word for it) to me is that a problem such as this was not picked up in beta testing (either by the HD manufacturers or Apple) and the OS was released with this major problem.  If it was picked up in beta testing then that is even more shocking.

There are several posts on WD's forums referring to this issue from before the release of 10.9.

If WD are admitting this issue exists & causes data loss why the heck don't Apple add it to the xprotect block list & stop it from running? They already block old versions of Flash & Java, what am I missing?

We are seeing new users lose more data everyday, isn't this why Apple added the ability to prevent code from running?

It's not just WD. It's also Seagate. The one common denominator most of us seem to have is that external drive problems came about after upgrading to Mavericks. I've called Apple three times on this and and got sympathetic non-committal answers. They are not even offering a modicom of acknowledgement on this issue. They may very well be working on this (they said they're referring the issue to "the engineers") but they might just mention somewhere that there is a problem.

Didn't I mention sending feedback to Apple? That is your best option.

Pete

jeffsphoto21 wrote:

 

It's not just WD. It's also Seagate.

And beyond, including Thunderbolt devices and eSata cards.  Promise R4 RAIDS are suffering as well.

http://www.zdnet.com/mavericks-issues-reported-with-thunderbolt-storage-esata-ca rds-7000022732/

Releasing a major OS as a freebie is a huge mistake, in my opinion.  Charging just $5 would have slowed down the adoption and allowed potential nasty bugs to be mitigated with less wide-spread damage. I don't understand why Apple is giving Mavericks away for free.  [shrug]

Anyway, it's been nearly a month, we're about due for a .1 release pretty soon.

Based on the info below I am afraid they may be focused on the wrong issues...

From Mac Rumors and others:

Apple has seeded the first beta of OS X Mavericks 10.9.1 to developers. The release asks testers to focus on Mail, Graphics Drivers and VoiceOver, though there are no known issues with the release.

Earlier this month, Apple released a special update to Mavericks to address issues using Gmail with the Mail.app client built into the OS.

The update is available to registered developers through the OS X Developer Portal.