Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Not only External HD's but SD's cards too !!!! Not even 10 mins ago I posted on here that I had lost all the conents of my External HD thanks to Mavericks (which Apple quickly removed) but just now I've inserted my SD card into my Late 2011 Macbook Pro and that too has now had it's contents deleted.

When I first inserted it, it was fine. That was until I went through and deleted some photos which I no longer wanted on there. Even though I deleted them the photo images still remained on the SD card though I could see they were in the trash. I then emptied the trash and all the photos I had deleted were still on the SD card but the one's I wanted to keep were all gone. This is unbelievable !!! I then tested it with an another SD card and it's doing the same thing. I ran DISK UTILITY and still the same problem. I tried the SD cards in my PC and no problems but the photos are gone !!! In one day I've lost years of photos and videos from my External HD and now all my photos from a recent trip to Croatia. This is a major problemn that Apple needs to be sort out now !!! I'm so angry !!!

It is very frustrating, but I can't understand why you would continue to feed new disks into the machine once one had been damaged. These disks were not backed up anywhere else?

You should take a look at GetRealBro's posts a few hours and days back. His experience suggests if you wait (about 10-20 minutes) the disk may appear readable or it could be mountable on an older OS version.

Once bitten, twice shy you say. Thanks but seriously don't you think this is Apple's mistake, not mine and every other person who's having this exact same problem? Sure maybe I should've thought about it before putting in the SD card but I wasn't expecting the worse when I did. This is an obvious problem which Apple needs to address.

Beside my WD drive running on raid 1 connecting with thurderbolt, I did experienced complete data loss with another USB drive as well.

Does anyone else have this problem with SD cards and USB drives?

I have read many of the troublesome postings here. For what it's worth, I have had no such problems. I upgraded to Maverick (now running 10.9) on a 13" 2.5 GHz i5 Macbook Pro and my Time Machine works perfectly with my WD 2TB Portable External Hard Drive.

However.... my mothers older iMac, running OS 10.7.5 suddenly does not mount her 1TB WD My Book External HD. I tried mounting it to my Mcbook Pro and nothing. So that particular problem would seem to lie with the Hard Drive, not related to OS or computer. Tried swapping cables, ports, power, etc. and still nothing :-(

Viewfinder

my mothers older iMac, running OS 10.7.5 suddenly does not mount her 1TB WD My Book External HD.....Tried swapping cables, ports, power, etc. and still nothing

Thats actually is very likely (7 out of 10 odds) an extremely common type of fault known as SATA card failure. Seen that kind of failure 1000 times over many years.

made a user tip on it here:

Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD

No issue with my SD card in my 2012 Mini.

Well, thank goodness I found this thread, because I thought I was going insane.  Pegasus R4 with 4 2 gig drives showed integrity errors that couldn't be fixed with disk utility after moving it from an iMac (late 2012) to a Mini (Mid 2011) that WAS running 10.8.x  Ran out and bought 2 Seagate 4T drives to see what I could recover. Disk Utility was unable to fix or mount.  Disk Warrior was unable to fix. Drive Genius 3 was unable to fix.  Data Rescue 3 let me move some data onto one of the Seagates, so I recovered some and moved it over to an old MacBook Pro (Mid 2009) with an SSD to check the data while trying to pull more from the Mini.  The Pro reported the Seagate drive as needing repair.  By this time I was about to go postal.  After sending the requested logs, Pegasus tech support told me to pull drive 1 of the RAID and try to mount.  I did, and it didn't.  Seagate on the MacBook Pro was repaired.  SSD came up with integrity issues.  Disk Warrior says that CANNOT be repaired. Will try bringing it up in target disk mode.  Back at the Mini, Seagate 2 came up with ingegrity issues.  Repaired it.  I suspected the Mini somehow roaming around corrupting things, or some kind of malware.  Ran scans, found the usual array of Windows viruses from spam, disconnected Dropbox from everything just in case.  Thought it might be the OS on the Mini, so "upgraded" to 10.9, not knowing it was a big mistake.  While still flailing, thought that perhaps the SSD in the MacBook Pro was at fault, since I installed it myself, so moved the original Seagate and the RAID to MacBook Air (Mid 2013).  The Pegasus mounts, and a sampling of files seems to be ok.  Original Seagate showed failures.  Repaired with Disk Warrior.  That ALSO now seems to be ok on the Air.  Air's SSD showed permissions problems that are supposedly now repaired.  I am holding my breath.

It USED to be that Apple tested software before deployment.  What, in the name of all that is holy, are they thinking?  What do I say to all the people I've told that Macs "just work?"  I've wasted three days of billable hours on this, plus may or may not have lost data on 3 machines!

mikkibarry 

.  Pegasus R4 with 4 2 gig drives

Pegasus is just a box, an enclosure, what drives are in same?   What RAID?

http://store.apple.com/us/product/H5184VC/A/promise-pegasus-r4-4tb-4x1tb-raid-sy stem

Using any WD software on your Mac?

use this FREE little test APP to verify (most people here use it for diagnostics)

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/48217/etrecheck

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. EtreCheck automatically removes any personally identifiable information from the output.

But it's a nice box :-)

RAID 5 4 Hitachi 2gig 7200 RPM 6.0 Gb/s drives, one of which is showing red after I took it out as directed by Promise tech support.  Not sure if that is the culprit or not.  The machine IS running Promise software.  No WD software being loaded using that nice little app that you pointed out.  Thanks! 

I may have gotten away safely.  It LOOKS like what happened was one of the drives in the RAID began to choke, and it wasn't handled properly either by the OS or by the Pegasus software.  My putting the Seagate drives on, leaving the Seagate software on them, caused the OS to throw errors.  I didn't know whether they were real or not at this point, but then I assumed they were real errors and started to worry for my data.  I use CrashPlan to back everything up, but it is PAINFULLY slow to try to restore large files, as in weeks (no kidding) for a couple of Tb. 

I braved the insane crowds and lines today to pick up a new drive, same size and speed as the existing Hitachis in the RAID, installed it, and tried to bring down the Promise Utility program, just to find they hadn't signed it.  D'OH!  Found the "You're not the boss of me" checkbox, installed it, ran it, rebuilt the RAID, rebuilt the mini's drive, and am in the process of reloading everything from the Seagates. 

Wish me luck.  Meantime, really Apple?  Between Mail.app crashes and this nightmare, I really have to wonder whether you've fired all of your testers.  I STILL have to retype the password to all of my exchange accounts whenever I restart Mail.  What's wrong with you guys?

GetRealBro wrote:

...

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)....

In the interest of full disclosure… I had been using the Seagate 3T a lot over the last few days without incident, while I completed my post-Mavericks-transition drive cleanup. But yesterday the Seagate 3T was slow to mount twice (i.e. 8min. fsck_hfs runs). Both times I had just rebooted back into Mavericks (on a partition of my MBP’s internal drive) after running Snow Leopard on a daisy chained 500GB FW800 portable.

In both cases  fsck_hfs ran twice, back to back. The first time was a QUICKCHEK ONLY where it declared the  FILESYSTEM DIRTY. The 2nd was an 8min run where it declared “The volume Seagate 3T appears to be OK.”

The important thing here is that during those 8+ minutes there is ZERO feedback to the user unless they are looking at the fsck_hfs log using the Console or Terminal.

—GetRealBro

My 3tb seagate hdd got wiped clean Even though I do not have wd software installed

I used a data recovery Software and got all my photos and videos except  for all bluray videos any suggestions on how to go about getting the bluray stuff back??

Here's part of an interesting response from Western Digital on my case - (bold italics mine):

"The case has been escalated to me for further support. Based on your email the unit you are having problems with is a Seagate drive not Western Digital. Please confirm if I am not mistaken.  If the unit is not from Western Digital then you may need to seek assistance from Seagate since the applications from WD will only interact with drive we manufacture."

Well, since neither my enclosure nor the drives were WD and I still suffered the 'MyBook' repartitioning issue, I am taking issue with that resonse.  Would anyone else who had non WD drives affected by the WD software like to add their voice to the choir? I suggest you contact WD....

Thanks for all the warnings, folks!  I haven't installed Mavericks yet, but was thinking of maybe doing so during the quiet Christmas week, to try it out - having first cloned my existing OS (Mountain Lion) to an external drive (not Western Digital), on which to fall back should I not like Mavericks.

Now I'm not so sure.

If I install Mavericks but don't like it, I was thinking I could just plug in my external drive with the Mountain Lion clone, boot from it, and then clone Mountain Lion back to my internal drive.

But if many of the posts here are to be believed, there's a risk that my external drive will be wiped as soon as I plug it in.

So I'm going to have to be very careful - and I'll be making two clones of Mountain Lion, to two external drives.

I don't like the sound of this at all.....