Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

miglio74 

I think the resolution involving spotlight privacy will only work with drives that are having problems mounting.  IF your drive was renamed/repartitioned and mounts fine, but is blank then adding it to privacy in spotlight may not work. I would contact Apple tech support directly and see what they say in regards to that.  I offered tech support that solution and the reply was that yes, although that may seem logical don't do it yet as we are still examining the problem.  Basically Apple tech support are saying to me, 'wait, do nothing until we can explore the problem and maybe come up with a solution."

So, one thing I would do is to uninstall Mavericks and go back to an earlier OS.  You don't have to do that, but I don't trust Mavericks at the moment.

Then, run the Western Digital uninstaller software:

WD uninstaller: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=126&sid=214&lang=en

In regards to accessing your data, you have several options.  Do nothing, and wait to see if Apple update Mavericks and/or provide information on how to reveal the hidden data. This is a possibility, but not one I'd place too much faith in.

Or use one or several of the following to try and recover the data.

http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/recovery-software/mac/  (Western Digital have in some cases been giving out free licenses for this so contact Western Digital and report your case)

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php  (buy from here: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Prosoft%20Engineering/56100/)

http://www.cleverfiles.com/

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Step_By_Step

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec_Step_By_Step

Thanks Blindeyetom,

now i'm scanning whit Test Disk, i've contacted WD and they pass me

http://www.krollontrack.com/data-recovery/recovery-software/mac/

but it rename the files and no folders, for me is a big problem, i've tryed also data recovery iskysoft, the free versione, and it's run very goo it found everything but is expensive form me, so now whit a frind i'm trying test disk.

@miglio74

Which method did you choose with iskysoft? Lost Data Recovery or Raw Data Recovery or Partition Recovery?

And with which options?

We all would appreciate more details please.

Hi Basilic,

I've choosen Partition Recovery quick scan

Good luck man

Add me to the list. I've gone thru 3 Seagate drives and a WD drive and have none of their software installed (coming from a clean Mavericks install). Once my partitiion goes offline I can still format the drive and it becomes usable again, so this is absolutely a Mavericks issue. Just wish Apple doesn't milk the iPhone/iPad train forever and drop the Mac side as they've been doing for the past few years.

Hi there.

I am following this thread because I am a bit worried, owing 3 external WD drives (a total of 5TB of data).

I upgraded to Mavericks as soon as it was available. I worked with it for a week and no problems to my external HDs (two on USB and 1 on FW800).

Then I read on the web about this problem and I immediatly disconnected my external HDs (one of them was a TM backup disk).

But yesterday I decided to connect my TM HD again. It works flawlessly....

There is no WD software on my machine...never installed and, to be sure, also checked as suggested in this thread.

But there is something that I am wondering. I didn't read every single message here, but I have not found an answer to my doubt.

Did the people having problems to their external HD all connect their drives before switching the Mac on and booting ?

I don't know if it has any effect, but couldn't it be a problem that arises while the system mounts a disk plugged in when the Mac is already running ?

I have always switched on the Mac with the drives already connected.... and I don't have courage to try to plug them in with Mavericks already up and running !

BTW, I own a Mid 2010 iMac i7.

Ciao !

Being a Certified Apple Support Professional I also saw an increase in requests from my customers losing their precious data after upgrading to the latest OS X. While I don't work for the responsible department, nor I have any reliable contacts there, I'm sure the fix will be available soon.

Meanwhile I can confirm that we were able to get the best results with data recovery in this disastrous situation with disk drill (by cleverfiles) in comparison to other recovery apps at the market (prosoft, ontrack, etc.).

In several cases we were even able to rebuild the original partition directory and even recover the original file structures. You might definitely want to try it out, there's a free version available at their website.

Similar issue with External Toshiba USB drive.  Disk is used by Time Machine and Mavericks appears to be corrupting the disk while trying to create directories for TM.   Disk Utility -> Repair corrects the problem but within in the next 24 hours TM will complain it can't back up and Verifiy shows the disk is once again corrupted.

This is a “blind men and the elephant” thread. Most of us are probably only seeing a small part of the whole Mavericks external drive issue. So like the proverbial blind men, we are only able to describe those small parts. Worse yet we don’t even know whether its one elephant, two or maybe there’s a rino in the mix.

Until someone starts populating a problem variable matrix (e.g. drive vendor, driver software, interface, activities,….., outcome) we are doomed to just report our external drive problems and hope Apple is really working on developing a solution ASAP. At least the posts in this thread may help others realize that their's is not a “personal problem”.

— GetRealBro

Like you, I also updated to 10.9 on day one, have multiple drives connected to my Mini and haven't suffered any data loss. In the course of working, I normally boot with the drives--WD, LaCie & OWC--in auto mode. That is, they sense a startup and automatically spin up. However, I also have several other drives I regularly use--G-Mini & WD portable--that are mounted a few times daily and then ejected with no problems. Of course, I uninstalled all OWC and WD apps/drivers prior to the update (last summer) as they were causing lots of problems.

I also own two other Macs--Mac Pro & iMac--and they also have external drives and are fine (LaCie RAID).

I have an external portable Seagate HD, too.

And I have mounted it a couple of times without any problem. But it is a 500GB HD, so I thought that maybe size matters (I've read that most failures are with >1TB drives)....

It would have been wonderful if I could have helped with my idea, but it seems that it wasn't so brilliant

@Alex.Chernenko

If not yet done I suggest you contact WD through here http://wd-mavericks-data-loss.com or call them and explain to them how you managed to recover with the tool you mentioned, so that we can all benefit of your experience and receive then a proper communication from WD.

According to their support website for this issue, the tool you mentioned has not proved to be efficient.

I did try myself lots of these tools and none of them have worked for me in respect of getting back the right folder structure and file names.

We will be able to recover something at some point with any of these tools. For my personal case, this is not enough and I really need to get back the proper folder structure and file names. I am a video editor and these video editing applications have to point to the correct file names. For my case this represents hundreds of folders and thousands of files.

@ThePiz

You said "Did the people having problems to their external HD all connect their drives before switching the Mac on and booting ?

I don't know if it has any effect, but couldn't it be a problem that arises while the system mounts a disk plugged in when the Mac is already running ?

I have always switched on the Mac with the drives already connected.... and I don't have courage to try to plug them in with Mavericks already up and running !"

I managed to work with Mavericks and the WD apps running and with my drive connected permanently during 4 days with 3 reboots during that period and with reads/writes to the external disk.

For some reasons I then ejected the disk and physically disconnected it. A couple of days later, the Mac was running and had to reconnect the drive. I got the drive repartitioned as soon as I plugged it.

You raised a good point.

Did you even get a solution to this problem at the Genius Bar?

Tony

For several days now, I’ve been trying to get my problem Seagate 3T disk (single partition) to fail again while running Mavericks. I began by using a USB3 Interface/base (which only works at USB2 speeds on my MBP). I would eject, un-attach and re-attach the single partition using the Finder or unmount and re-mount it using Disk Utility. When it didn't fail, I started copying GBs of data to it then ejecting or un-mounting and re-mounting. It worked fine.

So I switched to a FW800 interface/base, mounted it, copied 40ish GB of data and un-mounted it with Disk Utility and immediately asked DU to re-mount it.  Bingo.... it failed to mount. And, as before, Mavericks Disk Utility could not verify or repair the volume. The repair fails at

“Checking the file system

Volume repair complete.

Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.

Error: …."

I shut down and rebooted into Snow Leopard (10.6.8) with the drive still attached. The drive did not mount and SL’s Disk Utility could not verify or repair the volume (same story as DU in Mavericks). So I ejected the drive using DU and switched back to the USB3 interface/base. When I reattached the drive it mounted and verified!

I ejected the volume and restarted in Mavericks with the drive still attached. The drive mounted and verified!

So either this brand new FW800 interface/base is bad or Mavericks does not always handle this FW800 interface correctly, leaving the volume slightly damaged after un-mounting it. In either case, I’ll be using the USB interface/bases until this issue is resolved.

— GetRealBro

BTW the unmount/mount problems I have reported are at the partition/volume level, not the whole drive. While this drive has only one 3T partition/volume, the other problem 3T drive had two partitions. And only one of them had mounting issues.