Mybook studio raid 0, empty after installing Mavericks

I, too, received a license key for EasyRecovery 11 Professional. It’s still running, but it seems to work so far. I used, as adviced by Western-Digital, the option “Formatted Media Recovery”. Should this fail, I’m supposed to give “Deleted Files Recovery” a shot.

This application doesn’t change anything on the drives, you’ll need a second drive to copy recovered data to. Chances of deleting or accidentially overwriting data on a MyBook for real are slim.

The version provided by WD doesn’t seem to work on RAID-0 MyBooks. Mine was in a RAID-1 configuration, so, eh. People with current backups of their striped MyBooks should be able to at least recover said backups in case they were hosed by SmartWare, too. (As happened to one of my backup drives.)

I’ll keep you posted.

Update: First try with “Formatted Media Recovery”, as suggested by WD at first, didn’t work – it only found some thousands of Spotlight remains and one application DMG.

Now running “Deleted Files Recovery” with RAW option enabled. 6h to go. WD said that, should I only be able to recover parts of my data, this might be due to the drive’s adapter resetting to its default of RAID-0 during the “incident”, and I’d get further assistance in this case. Apparently, this involves re-installing WD RAID Manager. Gna.

More tomorrow.

I too have tried thie "Professional" version of the program but the "RAID" option was greyed out, and an alert instructed me to upgrade to the "Entreprise" version of the program if I wanted to recover data from a RAID.

nggalai, have you not had this problem? Or did you treat your RAID as a single drive?

André Vanasse1 wrote:

I too have tried thie "Professional" version of the program but the "RAID" option was greyed out, and an alert instructed me to upgrade to the "Entreprise" version of the program if I wanted to recover data from a RAID.

nggalai, have you not had this problem? Or did you treat your RAID as a single drive?

I treated it as a single drive – mirrored, RAID-1. The RAID option in EasyRecovery apparently is for striped RAID versions, in the case of most MyBooks RAID-0.

“Deleted Files Recovery” seems to find more (all?) of my data, albeit without the folder structure. 20min in, 8.000 files found, 6h to go. IIRC there should be a tad more than 100k files on this drive. We’ll see. Thankfully, I’m not a big fan of “deep” folder structures, so restructuring the data afterwards would “only” take me about an hour – if metadata is retained. If the files all turn out to be recovered with today’s date, “last modified” or “date created”, no dice.

P.S. 23 minutes in, 13.000 files found. This is looking promising.

I had a similar problem with my WD Studio II 4tb, and an older Seagate, in Leopard. When I decided to use the brand new and empty WD Studio in raid mode, I follow all the instructions, unplugging the other drive. After the software installation, I plug the older drive to transfer the files. I got the "Time Machine" message, said NO, and... my drive becomes EMPTY. All my work, music, photos, etc. I had backup of some very very important files in my internal HD, and DVDs, but the rest was gone. The problem, in my case, was the WD software. Every drive I try to plug to computer, USB, FW or even Tunderbolt would be erased, from that moment. Just the setted and controlled drives by the software would be safe. Just imagine if I plug a client's drive? So, I uninstalled the software, and use the WD Studio II as a simple drive, as well as two other drives. Turning to the discussion, it seems that the software was resetted when the Mavericks was installed, and didn't recognize the drives, causing a problem similar to mine.

(Sorry my english!)

Dinho Bomfim

I run all recovery methods that Ontrack Easy Recovery provides. "Search Lost Volume" didn't find my lost HFS+ partition. "Deleted File Recovery" and "Formatted Media Recovery" found some files, but without folders or filenames. Since I lost iMovie footage, this isn't useful at all. I then run a trial version of "Prosoft Data Rescue 3", and, despite all my disbelieve, the tool was able to detect my iMovie events folder including files and folders! The preview function was able to play my lost footage. So in my case, it seems 'Data Rescue 3' seems to be a very promising option to get the data on my lost HFS+ volume back. So for those that were unable to get their data back with the Ontrack tool, they might want to try the tool from Prosoft. Of course, I'll hope WD will provide me a license to get my data back, but I probably can't except that.

"It will run on any recent OS version, Ive verified this, ...however if youre running mountain Lion, I see no purpose to running it in your instance."

I am running mountain lion and I have WD Studio. I have no idea if WD Smartware downloaded any software on my iMac when I plugged it in and started using it for Time Machine. I don't recall asking it to but it has been a couple of years. I did search to see if there was any mention of it on my machine and all I see is the virtual CD that I can't get rid of. What I am wondering is can I run the uninstaller to confirm there isn't anything downloaded. If I do is there anything that could happen to the backups on time machine if I run the uninstaller? To tell you the truth I am afraid that something will happen that I won't know how to solve.

Eventually I want get Mavericks so that is why I am asking this. I also will be getting another hard drive (trying to figure out the best one will be no easy task) to back up my photos as I see how tenuous this all is....

Thanks for any help or if there is somewhere I can learn more about how all this works it would be appreciated.

Carol

If you are still running Mt Lion, keep doing so and never mind the WD software possibly on your system. Before upgrading to Mavericks, however, doubly back up using Time Machine and Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. On different disks at that.

Next, unmount and physically unplug those disks. Then download the WD uninstaller cited in this thread, and uninstall any and all WD software/ utilities with it. Then download and install Mavericks.

We have fair reason to believe that after that, it should be safe to plug your external HDDs in again, but do make sure to keep your secundary backup isolated, just in case.

all I see is the virtual CD that I can't get rid of

Try ejecting it with Disk Utility.

I also will be getting another hard drive (trying to figure out the best one will be no easy task)

Any one will do; you never know which of the 4 ( 3 without Toshiba, they only have 2.5" disks and are discontinuing the line ) remaining brands/ firmware of HDDs is inside the box anyhow. Just back up what you need to, before upgrading to Mavericks, and never, never plug it into your newly installed Mavericks Mac until the issue in this thread has been duly resolved.

Thanks hexdiy!

Are these files also part of the Western Digital Smartware software, and if so, should they be deleted? If yes, how should they be deleted?

/Library/Extensions/WD1394_64HPDriver.kext

/Library/Extensions/WD1394HPDriver.kext

/Library/Extensions/WDUSB_64HPDriver.kext

/Library/Extensions/WDUSBHPDriver.kext

Note: These files are still there after I had successfully run the WD Software Uninstaller that Western Digital posted to their website - http://community.wd.com/t5/News-Announcements/External-Drives-for-Mac-Experienci ng-Data-Loss-with-Maverick-OS/m-p/613777#M379

Okay, no go with EasyRecovery, at least for me. Similar situation alteryhas described: “Deleted Files Recovery” was able to, apparently, find all data on the hosed MyBook – but with generic file names, no metadata such as “date created“ or “last modified”, and no directory structure. Not feasible for the kind of data I kept on the MyBook.

Will give Data Rescue a shot.

Eventhough WD provided a key for OnTrack Easy Recovery Pro, the tool was not able to restore the original filenames and folderstructure.

DataRescue 3 http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php did a better job and seems to be able to recover the entire structure.

I asked WD to provide a licence key for the working tool. They better agree to this.

I'll keep you in the loop.

These 4 files are indeed from Western Digital. Should we delete them also?

cruiser607

> DataRescue 3 http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php did a better job and seems to be able to recover the entire structure.

When I tried it, demo version of Data Rescue 3 finds files and gives them generic names and lists them in generic folders like Images, Movies, etc. No original name, no original directory.

Was your drive emptied and renamed to MyBook, too?

@AKabas: In my case, yes. I ran 'Deep Scan' in Data Rescue 3 on the whole drive (not just the volume).

Haven't heard back from WD if they'll provide a license for the tool.