Mybook studio raid 0, empty after installing Mavericks

I'm currently trying OnTrack EasyRecovery Professional (offered by WD support). It wasn't able to find/restore the lost partitions, though. I'm now running a scan for lost files, but since the important data I lost is iMovie events/projects, I'm not very confident.

I was provided with a key to "EasyRecovery 11 Professional" by WD and I'm just trying it out right now and so far it is working great. With it, I am able to browse the my unmountable partition and recover files with filenames and the correct folder structure. So far, only one folder has failed.

I experienced unmountable partitions since I juse concatinated disc so I'm not sure if it will work as good as with you who got empty partitions (mine could have been empty as well, I just don't know since I can't mount it after the partition table change).

I used the feature called "explore" or something like that on the partition which gives you a file browser with your entire structure intact and you can simply click on the folder or files you want to recover and save it to another hard drive.

Because I would like to upgrade to Mavericks... soon!

WD says for 10.9, 10.8, 10.7 ..... so getting ahead sounds like a good idea.

So thank for you input....

nggalai wrote:

Neither Spotlight nor Find were able to find any WD software on said MacBook Pro last time I checked, and I also checked the paths posted in this thread (/Library/LaunchAgents etc.) using the Terminal.

Spotlight doesn't look into system folders (by design), it doesn't show hidden folders or files within hidden folders (Spotlight for the 'cd' command for example, it is located at /usr/bin/cd).

Spotlight is a blunt implement, you can't do brain surgery with it.

The unix 'find' command is better, but you still need to run it as root inside Terminal (via sudo) if you hope to see into the entire system.

Same here - I was doing a full scan and it found a lot of video files, photos and audio tracks. All of them with a 'standard' name and pathes are lost as well. This basically means for me that I have the raw data but none of the projects anymore. I chose the WD with RAID 1 as this was my archive where I put the 'final copy' so there is no backup. This is very sad.

You may need to turn "Hidden files" on. Here is how to do that:

Open the terminal (found in /Applications/Utilities/)

Type the following (without quotation marks) to show hidden files:

“defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true”

Hit enter

Type the following (without quotation marks) to restart the Finder: “killall Finder”

Hit enter

You can turn hidden files back off by doing the same thing, but switching the “true” to “false” in step 2.

And a random tip navigating in the finder: press ⌘ + ↑ (command + up arrow) to navigate to the parent folder, all the way up to root.

Excuse my ignorance if you've already done this.

Progress report:

WD sent me an activation code for Kroll OnTrack Professional today. (It's a 1-year license, BTW.) I notice that it's only the Enterprise edition (not "Professional") that supports RAID, but I wonder if that's not for the kind of configuration of the Studio II drives... nevertheless I emailed them back to ask for the activation for the Enterprise version instead - can't hurt to ask! In the meantime, I'm luckily in no imminent hurry for the data so I'm going to leave the drive off-line until we know more.

Meanwhile Apple phoned me back to ask a couple more questions about the partition table and also the WD software version, and to say that they've passed it on from their Asia engineering team to the California team.

Does 'show all files' allow you to search into folders owned by the system?

I cannot see items inside /Library/Extensions in Spotlight or via Find in the Finder when 'show all files' is on. Using the full file name of an item in that folder returns 0 results.

Sorry, Terminal is the only tool built into the system that gives you full access to the system.

Try looking inside /System/Library/User Template/ via the Finder. Only the system is allowed, Terminal can gain that level of permission via sudo.

Drew Reece wrote:

nggalai wrote:

Neither Spotlight nor Find were able to find any WD software on said MacBook Pro last time I checked, and I also checked the paths posted in this thread (/Library/LaunchAgents etc.) using the Terminal.

Spotlight doesn't look into system folders (by design), it doesn't show hidden folders or files within hidden folders (Spotlight for the 'cd' command for example, it is located at /usr/bin/cd).

Spotlight is a blunt implement, you can't do brain surgery with it.

The unix 'find' command is better, but you still need to run it as root inside Terminal (via sudo) if you hope to see into the entire system.

I know, and naturally I did use find as root / sudo’ed. 😉 I used Spotlight to try to locate the WD Drive Manager application in a first go, but apparently it wasn’t in /Applications at all, hence using find and navigating by hand inside the Terminal. Still, couldn’t find anything, the WD Uninstaller did, though. Weird.

I’m now too in contact with WD support staff. The first slew of info they requested makes me believe they’re still in the narrowing-it-down stage. But helpful lot, they reacted inside of 3 hours. Not bad. Haven’t heard anything from Apple yet.

received this email from WD today

**** Please do NOT reply to this email ****

Dear WD Registered Customer,

On October 30th, 2013 Western Digital informed registered customers of affected products via E-mail regarding reports of Western Digital and other external HDD products experiencing data loss when updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9). Our investigation to date has found that for a small percentage of customers that have the WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager and/or WD SmartWare software applications installed on their Mac, there can be cases of a repartition and reformat of their Direct Attached Storage (DAS) devices without customer acknowledgement which can result in data loss.

WD has been tracking this issue closely through our WD Forum and through our Technical Support hotline and the occurrence rate of this event has been very low. A specific set of conditions and timing sequences between the OS and the WD software utilities has to occur to cause this issue. Should this event occur, the data on the product can likely be recovered with a third party software utility if the customer stops using the device immediately after the OS X Mavericks (10.9) upgrade. WD will be issuing updated versions of these software applications that resolve this issue.

WD strongly urges our customers to uninstall these software applications before updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9), or delay upgrading until we provide an update to the applications. If you have already upgraded to Mavericks, WD recommends that you remove these applications and restart your computer. If you have already upgraded to Mavericks and are experiencing difficulty in accessing your external hard drive, please do not save anything to the drive, disconnect the drive from your computer, and contact Western Digital Customer Service at http://support.wd.com/country/.

Sincerely,
Western Digital

==============

Bit worried because guy from Apple Care has placed Ds-store file on each of my drives when obtaining drive imformation ,did mention to him that WD has said don't save anything to the drives but he said i don't think that would affect other imformation on drive, hope he's not a maverick.

.DS_Store is the Finders way of saving the window size & layout options, as such they are harmless, they just annoy Windows users when viewing disks from Macs 🙂

Hopefully the Applecare guy was not using Mavericks to view the drives, otherwise I'd consider it neglegent if he was aware of this issue & caused dataloss.

It seems to affect a (comparatively) minor number of users, however it is a real problem. Clearly he needs to learn how to use Macs properly without touching other peoples data…

http://krypted.com/mac-os-x/disable-disk-arbitration/

https://github.com/aburgh/Disk-Arbitrator

Your data sounds safe as far as I can tell, affected disks seem to have the partition data re-written & the disk gets renamed to EFI or MyBook or another default name.

It seems that earlier OS's are OK so hopefully that is what he was using. Only connect to older OS's & don't forget to make backups.

APPLECARE RANG ME THIS AFTERNOON SAID NOTHING MORE WE CAN DO FOR YOU, CONTACT WD TO RETREIVE YOUR FILES CASE CLOSED.

Was shocked and i think the guy from Apple, who had to pass on that message, was shocked and bewildered as well.

It truelly was as cut and dry as above. Totally wiped their hands of it as well as my drives

WOULD LIKE TO SEE SOME REPLIES TO THIS

The Apple support technician who initially took my case phoned me back yesterday to relay their final answer which was basically that "the engineers have not seen ANY OTHER issues like what I've experienced - the repartition to My Book and EFI" so they suggest I contact the drive manufacturer.

Disappointing response. I've never lost so much faith in a brand than in that moment. I realize this could entirely be a result of just the WD software, but given its other bugs I have not faith in my computer. I no longer trust that my computer won't cause my data to be lost again, etc.

The support guy on the phone was obviously disappointed and embarassed with their response. He's offered to help me downgrade back to Lion.

Meanwhile, Western Digital has been fantastic. Whether it's a result of them having the bigger PR fiasco from this, from a communication's perspective, at least they've acknowledged it (as they could have said, "nope, not us, it's all Mavericks".

WD has also given me access to the On Track Recovery Software....has anyone had any success or experience with recovering data from the My Book/EFI situations?

Since I updated to Maverick, I experienced some folders disappearing on my external Freecom NAS and visible again, like a traffic light.

Not all data is lost I hope, but I can't trust my software anymore, while it's neccessary for me as a graphic designer.

I don't use TimeMachine.

What would be the best thing to do?

Reinstall my computers again?

I've rolled back my desktop machine to M Lion using the clone that I took immediately before the "upgrade". I haven't lost any data, and following this thread has helped me clean up my computer significantly, but I won't be playing with Mavericks again for a while yet!