Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

I don't pretend to completely understand much of the talk about fsck or uuid but if this helps anyone out there to identify what may have happened I can say that on running various scans on my affected drive I found a couple of files with the date created and the date modified as being at the exact time I had the problem of the drive being repartitioned/reformatted.

These are:

journal

journal_info_block

VolumeConfig.plist

In addition, the following files had the date created (but not the date modified) as being at the exact time I had the problem of the drive being repartitioned/reformatted.

fseventsd-uuid

VolumeConfiguration.plist

Don't know if this is useful or not, but just putting it out there.

GetRealBro wrote:

So my questions now are...

What causes the system to do these longer fsck runs when mounting some drives, some of the time?

And why did it only start happening after the drives were used in Mavericks?

A volume is unmounted "cleanly" if there are no pending changes to its file system when it is unmounted. The next time it is mounted the appropriate fsck utility (usually the fsck_hfs one) runs a "quickcheck," determines it is clean, & exits without checking the file system for any inconsistencies.

Otherwise, the fsck utility will check it for inconsistencies & if it finds any will either try to repair them if they are easily fixed or exit with an error. Obviously, this takes longer, so what really needs to be determined is if or why the drive didn't unmount cleanly, or why Mavericks doesn't think it did.

As mentioned here, the file system events daemon (fseventsd) is involved in tracking changes to file systems, & its behavior changed beginning with OS 10.7 to track individual file changes. That may provide a clue about the reason for the fseventsd entries in your system logs. It may be that the special /dev/fsevents file used by 10.6.8 isn't recording individual file changes that the 10.9 version does & that is causing the longer runs.

R C-R wrote:....

 

. It may be that the special /dev/fsevents file used by 10.6.8 isn't recording individual file changes that the 10.9 version does & that is causing the longer runs.

Actually my fsck_hfs.log files show that once Mavericks whacked a drive/partition, the resulting fsck run in both 10.6.8 and 10.9 took about the same time. I have nearly 3 years of fsck.hfs logs in 10.6.8 and the ONLY ones that ran long were when I attempted to mount drives in 10.6.8 AFTER  they would not mount in Mavericks.

FWIW I now believe that these drives would have probably mounted, even in Mavericks, if I had known to wait 8 minutes or more with ZERO feedback from Mavericks that it was busy doing an fsck on this drive/partition. At the very least Maveriacks needs to provide users with some feedback when it kicks off a long fsck run ala Disk Utility's progress bars when it is doing an fsck (AKA Disk Aid - Verify or Repair). Better yet, Mavericks needs to be fixed so that it quits whacking drives so that they require these long fsck runs when they are subsequently mounted.

-- GetRealBro

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

Pete

petermac87 wrote:

 

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

 

Pete

I've only been using Macs for going on 3 decades (I still own a Mac XL) and I have NEVER provided Apple any feedback via that website. But I'll be glad to start providing feedback to Apple, when Apple starts providing feedback to me. Until then, Apple can take the trouble to monitor their own forums or not. Their choice.

--- GetRealBro

petermac87 wrote:

 

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

 

Pete

So should we give Apple feed back that we are ****** off that they don't give their customers any feedback.

I think they most certainly watch these posts . 48 PAGES most people don't post just read.  Apple train their staff to convey that this is the first time we have heard of this happening and WD say we are small in number.

62,952 people just looking for something interesting to read?? I don't think so.

Thank god Apple isn't a drug company!

Wrong, but believe what makes you feel good.

Pete

GetRealBro wrote:

But I'll be glad to start providing feedback to Apple, when Apple starts providing feedback to me. Until then, Apple can take the trouble to monitor their own forums or not. Their choice.

Do the math. There are many millions of users of Apple products. Over seven million of them have signed up to post to the discussions web site. There are thousands of new posts every day & dozens of different forums.

With this in mind, do you really think it would be practical for Apple employees to monitor all this, or wade through long, multi-faceted rambling discussions like this one looking for something useful they could pass along to engineering that they don't already know about?

GetRealBro wrote:

 

petermac87 wrote:

 

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

 

Pete

 

I've only been using Macs for going on 3 decades (I still own a Mac XL) and I have NEVER provided Apple any feedback via that website. But I'll be glad to start providing feedback to Apple, when Apple starts providing feedback to me. Until then, Apple can take the trouble to monitor their own forums or not. Their choice.

 

--- GetRealBro

No, these are not their feedback forums. Did you bother reading the Terms Of Use? You were meant to read them when you agreed to them upon registering at this site. You would then know that they are not monitored by Apple. Thus, you will never recieve feedback from them here. Go back and reread them. Your choice.

Cheers

Pete

CALLOHANh wrote:

62,952 people just looking for something interesting to read?? I don't think so.

That isn't the number of individual people; it is the number of times the topic has been viewed. Of those views, there have been a little over 700 replies. That is only about a 1.1% post to view ratio. If this issue was affecting thousands of users, then why isn't that ratio much higher?

The latest from Apple (doing their best to wash their hands of the issue).  This from an email from the tech support guy I've had 3 weeks of back and forth with:

"Sorry I haven’t heard anything yet about our issue from our engineers. It seems likely WD would be the best source in getting any work around since they are part of this. Our engineers will be able to advise us what to do if there was an existing fix from WD. I think it should be ok to go ahead for data recovery at this point."

So basicallly that's a 'not our problem, talk to WD' reply and an admission that any talk of being able to reecover the partitions or reveal a file structure that was somehow hidden was a vague wild guess. Believe me I'm not quite ready to let Apple off the hook with this just yet.  My biggest complaint is not that this happened (anoying though it is for me, and catastrophic for some it seems) but that it was missed (or worse still ignored) during beta testing.

blindeyetom wrote:

 

 

 

So basicallly that's a 'not our problem, talk to WD'

Are these Apple Drives you are talking about?

Pete

No, my issue was with a OWC Rack filled with Seagate Drives and set via Hardware RAID to RAID 5.  Connected via firewire it got repartitioned/reformatted to 'MyBook' one day after installing Mavericks.  I eventually (thanks to this forum) found the WD software files in my Mac's Library. The WD software was not in my Apps folder and wasn't (or shouldn't have been) running at the time I plugged in the drive.  I never even knew the software was on my machine until this problem occured.  I do have a few WD drives but don't ever remember installing any of their software as the first thing I do with drives is reformat them.

I have an open case with WD about this but it's like talking to a brick wall about the price of cement witht them.  In any case, Although I rooted out the WD software as the major culprit, I'm not about to let my dissatisfaction with Apple go unreported.  As far as I'm concerned, they are at the very least an accomplice in this

Most of the data on that array was backed up.  I was in the process of reorganising a bunch of stuff and had let my back up routine lapse a bit so I know I've lost some data - even with running data recovery software I'll doubtless have lost some stuff permanently, but thankfully it was not a catastrophic collapse as it has been for some people.  I'm still not happy about the whole thing though.  I'm a freelance photographer working in journalism and documentary and that data is important to me.  As a freelancer, I'm also my own I.T. department, so on a positive note I can say I've learned a few more things though this experience and from the info people have posted on this forum.

Yes I am going to complain to Mercedes about my displeasure with the Bridgestone tyres I am running on my car.

Good luck with all that.

Pete

petermac87 

Are these Apple Drives you are talking about?

Apple doesn't make HD (or SSD), never has.   WD, Hitachi, Seagate, Toshiba.

R-C-R is correct of course, .. Apple engineering knows about this occurrence.

This board is Apples 'backyard', while obviously not reading posts, they know what is 'going on' with any such instances as this.  So, you're all right in one manner or another.

Feedback on this issue with ext. HD is like calling 911 on an accident a 100 people have witnessed and 'called in on'.  Its being worked on.

Peter- not everyone working for Apple,... logically works in engineering,.. so that someone 'didnt know X' is no implication of Apple not knowing something.

Be nice and don't pick on each other. 

This issue with Mavericks and ext. HD corruption is being discussed here on this board below at some length (in Chinese):

升級OS X Mavericks 後造成我外接硬碟資料全部消失～

http://www.mobile01.com/topicdetail.php?f=482&t=3617199&p=2

(With great difficulty, I went thru all 6 pages of posts )