Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

CALLOHANh

but an admission here by WD that it is their software acting without customers permission.

WD software (older before the update) was acting on its own after installation before Mavericks,.. same as during Mavericks.

Though WD software has yet to be dissected by anyone here yet, ....there is no question that as per WD drive (MyBook mostly) corruption, that causation is binary (both Mavericks & WD software acting in an unknown unison to manifest the fault)    regarding those with known WD drives (Mybook and otherwise) and corruption.  

Said WD software (with NAS, RAID or USB/FW/ etc. HD) had no such causation on its own in use in the Mountain Lion environment.

WD admitted some 2+ weeks ago as to their part in the binary causation.

~The remaining questions are sad reports from those like Zeusmyth  above is:

1. Is there any legacy WD software present or current (older just replaced) WD software?

2. Is there, outside of established binary causation between WD (older) software & Mavericks,.....a single source (i.e. Mavericks causation alone) happening to drives where no WD software is present.

Barring the premise of ANY hard drive control software, those who experienced corruption, there are extremely few tethered commands happening between any direct attached storage drive and Mavericks itself (except in the case of a RAID array).

However I recall no mention here (correct my error) where a RAID array was corrupted that was 100% disk utility controlled by Mavericks (rather said RAID were MyBooks and WD software controlled)..also some Seagate RAID however I dont recall what control SW was used for same.

GetRealBro

The important thing here is that EtreCheck does not correctly tell

              EtreCheck is about useless for telling you anything about your external HD other than you HAVE one.

Zeusmyth

Sorry about that awful occurrence.

As for: Seagate "expansion drive" & Seagate "GoFlex"   etc. 

        All these names are marketing fluff.  Just as there is no such thing as a "PC hard drive"  vs. a "Mac hard drive" (formatting yes, but not the mechanical HD itself),... all the fluffy names marked on drives such as "expansion drive" or "goflex"; none of these designate anything, some have metal enclosure or fancy plastic ones with diff. colors etc, or diff. connections (firewire, thunderbolt, USB),....inside the boxes are all the same bricks.

             Its a giant pile of bricks (hard drives) painted different colors (goflex, expansion, PC, Mac).

E27 wrote:

 

Back on nov 11 we posted this:

 

After using the zip the following has been left as a launchdaemon plist on the HD:

…

Apologies I missed that.

I wonder what WD's logic is for leaving this behind? Perhaps it is to stop users installing older versions from any new disks that have the old installers pre-loaded, weird.

No worries - this thread has gone on way too long as users should never have been put through this data loss nonsense in the first place.  We never migrated for other reasons so we have not lost data like others.  We are on 10.5 10.6 and 10.8.  Wd and apple and others should have had this code corrected long ago and not let this krp code out into the wild.  Every time an update is put out to the masses it really is a beta.... Until the bugs are worked out.  We do not update unless there is no other option.  Unfortunately apple and others do this under the guise of the latest and greatest?!?  Bs.

Peace.

Hey there,

I understand that the names given by segatte are nothng more than marketing tactics of promoting the HDs What i pointed out was that my expansion drive did not come with any installed software from segatte and even if it did i had not installed it. Such software - the back software, was present in Go flex but again the same was not installed.

Now i accept i am technically challenged when we start talking the techie lingo moving between RAID, FAT etc etc is a little difficult for me. However, what i do know is that these two drives were working fine on my macbook air for last 2 years and suddenly went poof after mavericks. Hard to believe that it was segattes fault.

I have read a lot of other complaints which i am facing as well - issues of fast user change, system having become slower, increase in fan noise, faster power draining, the best of em all - system does not sleep if you have left iphoto open. If you sum all of them together - this is a bad software release by Apple - something we all do not accept and hence the reason why we all upgraded our systems on or after few days of the release.

My only request to apple is that there are people like me who are not tech savvy or probably are ancient tech - for our benefit please find the solution.

Z

Zeusmyth wrote:

 

I have read a lot of other complaints which i am facing as well

…

My only request to apple is that there are people like me who are not tech savvy or probably are ancient tech - for our benefit please find the solution.

You can post an EtreCheck report, it should indicate if you still have WD or Seagate or any other 3rd party disk software still actively running. You may not be able to help but providing another statistic may be useful to sway the focus.

Just let us know if you have attempted to remove any of the known bad software after hearing about this issue.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck, it doesn't say much about the actual HD's so don't worry if they are disconnected.

Others have created new threads to troubleshoot the issues you mention so you should do the same if they are affecting your Mac, a description of your issues & a report is a reasonable place to start a new thread.

R C-Rthanks.  Just ran EtreCheck and it seems like it might well be a useful program to have.  I've already uninstalled and removed the damned WD files but it will help in being more vigilent in future...

GetRealBro wrote:

.....

BTW I've been testing this drive with Spotlight enabled (i.e. the drive was not in the Privacy panel) because Spotlight was one suspected cause.

.....

I’m ashamed! Apparently I did not support the world economy as much as the others who had been posting in this thread

But just in case you have found time to return from your Black Friday shopping with enough energy/consciousness …

Since I added the Seagate 3T to the Spotlight Privacy panel I have run my standard procedure 30 times on the Seagate 3T and have not been able to cause this drive/partition to fail to mount again (i.e. run fsck for 8+ minutes before finally mounting or not).

Of course, it is never possible to prove the absence of failure. My Seagate 3T could fail to quickly mount the very next time I try to mount it. So you will have to draw your own conclusions and act accordingly.

For my part, I’m through testing and ready to move on with Spotlight turned off on ALL external drives.

— GetRealBro

I have the WD 2 TB passport that I use with Lightroom. My time machine backup is also a WD disk. I have never installed any WD software. Yesterday for the first time I launched Lightroom after upgrading to Mavericks and after a few minutes and system just crashed, no warnings, nothing. I could not boot back into it, so I went to revcovery and restored using Time Machine. Everything was good for like another hour after the restore when Time Machine started to complain. Disk Utility said that is could not be verified and was scrweed. So, I formatted the disk (something which I regret now) and started Time-machine again. The first backup was fine but the incremental hourly backups started showing the same errors. In the meantime whenever I would try to access the WD 2 TB passport the system would freeze and crash. I removed all my externals and reinstalled Mavericks from recovery.

I am dreading to connect any of my drives back again becuase I read something about Mavericks screwing up WD disks. I want to go back to Mountain Lion but there are no proptier instructions on how to do that. I would really appreciate any suggestions and help!

PlotinusVeritas wrote:

 

CALLOHANh

but an admission here by WD that it is their software acting without customers permission.

 

 

WD software (older before the update) was acting on its own after installation before Mavericks,.. same as during Mavericks.

 

Though WD software has yet to be dissected by anyone here yet, ....there is no question that as per WD drive (MyBook mostly) corruption, that causation is binary (both Mavericks & WD software acting in an unknown unison to manifest the fault)    regarding those with known WD drives (Mybook and otherwise) and corruption.  

 

Said WD software (with NAS, RAID or USB/FW/ etc. HD) had no such causation on its own in use in the Mountain Lion environment.

 

WD admitted some 2+ weeks ago as to their part in the binary causation.

 

 

~The remaining questions are sad reports from those like Zeusmyth  above is:

1. Is there any legacy WD software present or current (older just replaced) WD software?

2. Is there, outside of established binary causation between WD (older) software & Mavericks,.....a single source (i.e. Mavericks causation alone) happening to drives where no WD software is present.

 

Barring the premise of ANY hard drive control software, those who experienced corruption, there are extremely few tethered commands happening between any direct attached storage drive and Mavericks itself (except in the case of a RAID array).

 

However I recall no mention here (correct my error) where a RAID array was corrupted that was 100% disk utility controlled by Mavericks (rather said RAID were MyBooks and WD software controlled)..also some Seagate RAID however I dont recall what control SW was used for same.

...............:

Sometimes see your posts as a little cryptic but generally hit the nail on the head.

 

If causation is binary ?

Is the causer in the more powerful position, allowed imunity? (Tongue and check)

 

I think a more pertinant question however.

Why the WD software in the first place?

or is it firmware in enclosures?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Garyali wrote:

 

I am dreading to connect any of my drives back again becuase I read something about Mavericks screwing up WD disks. I want to go back to Mountain Lion but there are no proptier instructions on how to do that. I would really appreciate any suggestions and help!

See the user tips, there are 2 examples of reverting to eariler OS's.

https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/os_x_mavericks?view=documents

This is not just WD drives. I have  Seagate 500GB Fw 800 drive that no longer mounts. Only after reading these forums did I noive that the drive was not going to sleep. Now, it does not even mount. Clearlly, Apple never fully tested FW drivers, (their own invention) under Mavericks. I am screwed!

See the user tips, there are 2 examples of reverting to eariler OS's.

https://discussions.apple.com/community/mac_os/os_x_mavericks?view=documents

Thanks, I already checked the user tips, especially (https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6162). My problem is that when I try to erase disk0 as suggested in the article disk utility gives an error - "Disk utility secure disk erase failed with error - can't unmount disk" everytime!

jam59 wrote:

 

This is not just WD drives. I have  Seagate 500GB Fw 800 drive that no longer mounts. Only after reading these forums did I noive that the drive was not going to sleep. Now, it does not even mount. Clearlly, Apple never fully tested FW drivers, (their own invention) under Mavericks. I am screwed!

Maybe not. As I have documented in gory detail in this thread, there are certain conditions (that  I do not fully understand) that will cause fsck_hfs to initiate a very long process while it checks out the drive before it mounts. This can take 8+minutes to complete. During that time Disk Utility will incorrectly report that the drive/partition is not repairable. But, at least in my case, when I waited until the fsck_hsf process completed, the drive/partition would in fact mount and no data was lost.

You can see if fsck_hfs is the reason your disk is not mounting by opening the Console utility. In the left hand panel click on /var/log then click on fsck_hfs.log. The fsck_hfs process is run every time a disk is mounted. Usually the process takes only seconds and produces 5 lines in the log, with the 2nd line containing (NO WRITE) and the 4th line reading QUICKCHECK ONLY; FILESYSTEM CLEAN. If your log does not include these terns, fsck_hfs is doing a much more involved check which can take a very long time (8+minutes) to complete. Just be patient and wait for the fsck_hfs log to say "** The volume XXXXXXX appears to be OK."

-- GetRealBro

Garyali wrote:

Thanks, I already checked the user tips, especially (https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6162). My problem is that when I try to erase disk0 as suggested in the article disk utility gives an error - "Disk utility secure disk erase failed with error - can't unmount disk" everytime!

Please see my reply to you in the Re: spontaneous overnight hard drive wipe ??? topic in which you also mentioned this problem.

This thread isn't the place to get help with reinstalling/ erasing, post a new topic & someone will help.

FWIW if the Mac shipped with 10.7 or greater it should support internet recovery mode (Command+Option+R at startup), just use a wired ethernet connection if possible.

https://support.apple.com/kb/HT4718