Q: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

Sorry jadbel3, I may have not frame my question clearly.

What I meant to ask is:

     Is your WD drive a startup disk (i.e. bootable disk) ?

"I will not be installing the new WD Drive manager software.  I have no need of it in any case. "

Sometimes, we need to use the Drive Manager, e.g. to reconfigure the WD drives into certain RAID type.

If Marvericks has a utility that we can use, then we don't need the WD software.

"The new, Mavericks compatible version of the WD Drive Utilities has a publish date of 9/2013"

If the release date is 9/2013, don't use it. I think WD resolved the problem later than this date, most probably towards to end of November.

estApple wrote:

 

"The new, Mavericks compatible version of the WD Drive Utilities has a publish date of 9/2013"

If the release date is 9/2013, don't use it. I think WD resolved the problem later than this date, most probably towards to end of November.

Apparently, the problematic software was the "WD SmartWare" package, not the "WD Drive Utilities" one. Sorry for any confusion I might have caused by referring to these softwares generically as the "WD utilities" but until the new "Smartware" software was released (on November 25th) it was not clear which software component was the culprit.

From the SmartWare link above, note that installing it removes prior versions of the "WD Drive Manager" component. I have no idea exactly how the Drive Manager relates to the Drive Utilities or SmartWare packages, but judging from the published system requirements for each of the latter two (which specifically includes OS 10.9) & the earlier fiasco WD surely wants to put behind it, I would guess that these two items have been much more thoroughly tested with Mavericks & are safe to install.

But personally, I would not install any of this (or any other drive makers') utility software to begin with, unless I absolutely needed access to some function it, & it alone, provided.

estApple wrote:

Sometimes, we need to use the Drive Manager, e.g. to reconfigure the WD drives into certain RAID type.

If Marvericks has a utility that we can use, then we don't need the WD software.

Disk Utility includes fairly extensive support for RAIDs. What can you not do with it that you can do with the WD manager (or other WD) software?

Thanks for the help in info to all.

I recovered 889 GB of data off the drive.

It isn't indexed or organized as it was, and will take hours upon hours to reorganize, but I think it may all be there.

I cannot believe that this has happened, but glad all WD software should be removed now.

As one other person posted, I too never use manufacturers image or software. I immediately reformat with disk utility.

I thought that the Mac can only see Mybook Studio II as a single drive, not as one composed of two disks and therefoe would not be able to reconfigure Studio II into RAID types.

I have never used the RAID function of Disk Utilities. I may try later. If it is OK, then I would not touch the WD software ever again.

@estApple your right, you can not use Disk Utility to effect the RAID status of the WD Studio Drives. If you want to change to RAID1 (it ships as RAID0) then you must install their software.

I'm guessing best practice would be to delete immediately from now on! Or buy another brand of RAID drive.

Hello estApple,

Sorry for the misunderstanding. No, my WD is just used for storage backup. However, I do have a SATA II that I used with OS X Lion on it. That's actually what went down on my iMac. My 2006 iMac's internal HD went kaput on me around a yr ago and a friend just happened to have a 500 gig SATA II. I put Lion on it and it ran smoothly until a few weeks ago. When I plug the SATA into my new MacBook Pro with Mavericks it doesn't recognize it. That makes me curious as to whether this is a WD problem or a Mavericks problem. I thought the SATA's problem might be the casing, switch, or USB. I bought a new shell (case) and tried it and it still didn't work. My next step is to take it in and have them test the SATA itself. I haven't gotten around to that yet. I played around with a fIlash drive yesterday and after I erased it in Disk Utility the computer recognized it. Funny thing on this thread I see a lot of people doing some unistalling of WD software. My new Mac doesn't have any WD software on it (and I've searched following some of the instructions on this thread) and my WD drive still is not recognized with the exception of course when I use Migration Assistant. That's what saved me! I wish Migration Assistant worked for you. That's another enigma to me.

In the mean time I'm wondering what to use to back up my system. I use to use Carbonite (outside source) but when I started using the external SATA they couldn't back up off an external drive. I'm scared to buy another HD and I hate to spend all that money on Time Capsule. I might end up doing that.

Oh, BTW. Just for the heck of it I tried plugging my WD into my HP Pavillion. It recognized that I plugged something in via USB but it didn't show up as a HD. It does show up under devices labeled Mybook. It wouldn't open though. Of course that could be because it's formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).

Message was edited by: jadbel3

blindeyetom wrote:

You can also look at the following steps:

 

Using Apple’s Activity Monitor from /Applications/Utilities quit the following processes:

• WDDMService
• WD Quick View
• SmartwareServerApp

 

• Delete /Library/LaunchDeamons/com.wdc.WDDMService.plist (Entry that causes WDDM to start.)
• Delete /Library/LaunchDeamons/com.wdc.WDSmartWareServer.plist (Entry that causes the SmartWare Server to start.)
• Delete /Applications Support/WDSmartware (Removes all SmartWare support programs)
• Delete /Application/WDSmartWare (SmartWare user interface)
• Delete Library/Preferences/com.wdc.smartware.plist
• From System Preferences->Users Login Items remove WDQuickview for all users. (Entry that runs WD Quick View when a user logs in. There should be a single entry for all users. Deleting it from one any account should remove it for all accounts.)

This has been mentioned (with the additional first step of running the SmartWare uninstaller application located in /Applications/) in several posts in several different topics here in the ASC forums. It comes from a suggestion "Totalsupport" (a WD staff member) made in this WD community blog on November 2nd, before WD released the now no longer available WD uninstaller that (presumably) does all these steps automatically.

For those not willing to install any of the updated WD software, it should still work.

Both Apple and Western Digital have been unable or unwilling to answer any of my repeated questions on what caused this problem with the Mavericks OS/WD software incompatability in the first place and more importantly (in my mind) as to why this was missed/ignored in beta testing.

The bug appears to be an obscure one triggered by some unusual circumstances & rarely encountered sequence of events on users' systems. Despite its catastrophic nature, it appears that it has affected relatively few users (relative to the total number of users that installed the WD software prior to upgrading to Mavericks). That isn't much consolation if your are one of the affected ones, but it does help explain why it wasn't discovered during beta testing.

Unfortunately, such things happen from time to time even with software from the most diligent of developers. It isn't possible to test all the combinations of hardware, system configurations, interactions with other third party additions that might also be present on users' systems, etc. -- there are literally millions of combinations, far too many to test them all. Only when the reports of problems begin coming in do the developers get an idea of how to trigger the bug, see what might be causing it, & how to fix it.

In fact, weird as it sounds sometimes they never discover exactly what triggers it, only that it is in a block of code that a rewrite avoids using.

That is part of the reason they sometimes don't comment on the cause. Another (& more likely) reason is doing so might reveal details of how proprietary code works, particularly details that might violate a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) between Apple & other developers. Every software developer that works with Apple has to sign such things to get access to pre-release software & help from Apple debugging their code -- even the free developer connection anybody can sign up for requires an NDA. And of course, no developer wants its proprietary code revealed to its competitors, so all parties have good reasons to enter into these agreements.

Besides that, any useful explanation of the cause is likely to make sense only to programmers familiar with the intricacies of coding for OS X -- for most users all the mentions of APIs, initializations, boundary conditions, & so on that would require would sound like a foreign language, which in a way it is.

For all these reasons, it is always best to avoid third party additions that install system modifiers (like launch daemons & agents, kernel extensions, & startup items) whenever possible. There is always a risk they will, singly or in combination, cause problems.

Sorry that I have not read your post carefully.

As far as I can see, there are three WD "utilities" software: WD Drive Utilities, WD Smartware and WD Drive Manager. I know that Smartware is for backup but I do not know what are the differences between  Drive Utilities and Drive Manager.

From the download page of My Book Studio II, I can only see the WD Drive Manager, not the Drive Utilities. So I assume that the Drive Manager is compatible while the Utilities Manager is not.

A table  listing the Operating Systems (OS) in which the WD hard drives are supported:

http://wdc.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1708/p/228,260,230/session/L3Rpb WUvMTM4Njc2OTE2Mi9zaWQvM1JCM0l5SGw%3D

In it you can see what OS are compatible and what software can be downloaded for that WD drive.

From the links in the table, you can see that the utilities software for My Book Thunderbolt Duo is "WD Drive Utilities" and that for My Book Studio II is "WD Drive Manager".

"The bug appears to be an obscure one triggered by some unusual circumstances & rarely encountered sequence of events on users' systems."

You are right, after upgrading to Mavericks, my Studio II run smoothly for a few weeks and then one morning, it died on me without any sign that I could pick up before that disaster. But this is even more scary since I would not know when a good running system would one day meet this fatal sequence of events. Wish that WD/Apple resolve this issue nicely.

There are two things that I wish to confirm.

(1) The issue of turning a WD Drive empty is only related to the WD software. That is, things would be fine if there is no WD software running.

(If yes, then I would simply avoid using the WD software. Most probably, just use the WD software to configure the RAID and then remove the software completely as suggested by campervancoder.)

(2) The updated WD Drive Manager has resolved the issue sucessfully.

estApple wrote:

As far as I can see, there are three WD "utilities" software: WD Drive Utilities, WD Smartware and WD Drive Manager. I know that Smartware is for backup but I do not know what are the differences between  Drive Utilities and Drive Manager.

Just to make things even more confusing, there is also a WD RAID Manager for WD models like the My Book Studio II or the My Book Thunderbolt Duo that contain two drives.

Trying to sort out all the functions each of the WD software components provides from the documents on WD's site gives me an epic sized headache, but among the few things I think I have found is that the models with a capacity guage require the installation of the WD Drive Manager for that guage to function.

From the links in the table you mentioned, the Thunderbolt Duo requires WD Drive Utilities for Mac, which apparently includes the RAID Manager, yet as you mention the Studio II requires the WD Drive Manager, which I guess also included the RAID Manager or its equivalent.

Taking everything into account, it looks like the best advice is to avoid installing any of this stuff unless you need it, for instance (as you mentioned) to reconfigure a dual drive model for RAID 1 & take advantage of the RAID Manager's (??) ability to monitor the status of the mirrors & rebuild one as needed.

It also looks like WD doesn't give you much choice to pick & choose among the components you need -- it seems basically to be an all or nothing process that installs the necessary app(s), manager(s), & support files for multiple functions. In that case I guess the best you can do is make sure you have the most up-to-date versions before upgrading to Mavericks, & that WD explicitly says those versions support 10.9.

What a mess!

estApple wrote:

There are two things that I wish to confirm.

 

(1) The issue of turning a WD Drive empty is only related to the WD software. That is, things would be fine if there is no WD software running.

For the specific issue of an external drive (whether a WD one or another brand) being reformatted with the characteristic "MyBook" partition name, I think there is zero doubt the cause is the WD software (although which specific component is the culprit remains unclear). In that one case, there should be no such problems if the old WD software is not installed.

That does not mean some other problem, like file system corruption or failure to mount, has the same cause. That cause may be something in Mavericks itself, but it is more likely to be something else, like some other third party software that isn't compatible with Mavericks, a hardware issue that only affects systems running Mavericks (maybe due to the new memory management or security features not present in earlier OS versions), or some kind of file system corruption or file damage on the startup disk that occurred during or after installing Mavericks.

Obviously I hope, each of these causes has a different fix & will require identifying that specific cause before it can be eliminated. Only if the cause is something specific to Mavericks itself is the proper fix likely to be reverting to an earlier OS version -- otherwise the underlying cause is still there, & could cause problems (for example) when installing other software or a security update for the older OS version.

(2) The updated WD Drive Manager has resolved the issue sucessfully.

That seems to be true, but again, only for the specific reformat issue mentioned above.

Sorry, but I guess I keep missing the point here. My Seagate drive now appears unformatted. I never had WD drives or software. This external drive problem happened with a fresh install of Mavericks on a new iMac. I have three G Drives and six Seagate drives, All of which ran flawlessly on my old MacBool Pro running Mountain Lion. All my drives were reformatted using Disk Utiliy as soon as I took the shrinkwrap off - I never use the mfg. drive software. Everybody seems to be going in circles about WD which at this point seems to be the symptom not the problem - which I believe is Mavericks. And still no acknowledgement from Apple on ANY of the issues raised.