Mybook studio raid 0, empty after installing Mavericks

At present I would not take the risk if I didn't need to. It seems that a lot of different brand drives are being reported as failing. I was lucky. I updated to Mavericks the day it was released and lost no data from my two WD drives. If I knew what I know now, I wouldn't have taken the risk and just waited. It's not that big of a change from Mountain Lion to Mavericks anyway.

Cheers

Pete

2011's 17" MBP, with WD My Book Essencial 3 TB, came with window's NTFS format.attach to MBP using usb 2.0.

Am I a silly oldtimer, or am I correct in assuming that without purpousely installing something like Paragon NTFS, Tuxera or NTFS -3G, Mac OSX can still not write to NTFS formatted drives ( dual booted in Windows, of course a Mac Intel computer can)? See also: http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/106589/write-in-ntfs-using-mavericks

If the latter, this means that the disastrous interaction between WD software and Mavericks can overcome that barrier, thus reformatting said drive as documented in this thread.

Which leads me to the following question: have any of the users affected in this topic NOT EVER dual booted into Windows on the Macs the disaster occurred with? And: have any of the users affected in this topic NOT EVER used Paragon NTFS, Tuxera or NTFS -3G?

Maybe this seems outlandish, but if not, this would leave us here with a 3rd and maybe 4th factor to reckon with, apart from WD software and Mavericks, which remain the usual suspects.

Is there a linguistic confusion here between "update" and "upgrade"? http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1444

In my world (computer literate and English Major) and as previously used industry wide,10.0.0 thru 10.9.xx… would be an update and 10.0.0 to 11.0.0 would be and upgrade. Price being irrelevant. Today the terms are erroneously used interchangeably. Sloppy use (misuse) of English. And yes, I am guilty of this misuse too. {;-o

The overwrite/corruption apears to happen at the drive partition table level without any user intervention. If the attached drive is writeable it can get toasted in this situation. Having NTFS format volume on the drive makes it logically "read-only" but it can still be broken by a forced corrupting write. Take NTFS off the table it matters not here.

Regardless of current data format the drive is lost and remember it does not even have to be a WD drive.

Just because I used a WDbook at some time in the past I just lost 1TB of time machine backups going back 3+years. Breaks a lot of trust.

Don, Disagree with letting WD + Apple off the sharp hook - WD drive software could/should have been added to the Incompatable for Mavericks list and sidelined during the upgrade process. I really can't believe that this issue never showed up once during beta/seeded/early adoption versions.

Nuking another vendors drives with no user intervention required - shamefull.

Today the terms are erroneously used interchangeably. Sloppy use (misuse) of English. And yes, I am guilty of this misuse too.

Never mind, Niteowl. We pretty much all are partners in crime when it comes to this confusion. But when it comes to "auto update", I wouldn't want my Mac to "auto upgrade" to Mavericks al of a sudden, especially not now! :-(

So much for the off-topic and sorry for my pedantry. But I hope you see my point...

BTW: English is not my mother tongue.

Having NTFS format volume on the drive makes it logically "read-only" but it can still be broken by a forced corrupting write. Take NTFS off the table it matters not here.

Actually, Gannett, I was hoping for a reply like this. Maybe it will help narrow the search for a solution.

Regardless of current data format the drive is lost and remember it does not even have to be a WD drive.

If we cannot trust the few remaining HDD manufacturers these days, we're utterly lost. Which of them remains? HGST has been gobbled up by WD, Samsung is going SSD only, and Toshiba is rolling up as well, except maybe for 2.5" HDDs...

Just because I used a WDbook at some time in the past I just lost 1TB of time machine backups going back 3+years. Breaks a lot of trust.

No need to break too much trust, there hasn't been any left, at least with me. Just staying practical.

Anyhow: ancient WD software must be the culprit in this case, unless somebody comes up with crippled firmware and/or Sata chipsets.

With respect, write permission was granted to the now-incompatble WD software when it was installed - you would have had to used your Admin password to installed the software, as it lives and works at System level.

The mechanism by which the 'nuking' occurs has yet to be publically revealed, but you can pretty much bet that the software that did it had the necessary permissions to blow away the partition table and rename the volume to the default 'MyBook'.

Other brands of drive than WD have also been affected, it would seem, and whether or not their own proprietory software has the same problems, or if those systems also had WD software on them I don't know. All my direct-attached-storage drives are WD, albeit in generic cases (ie: not a 'MyBook'), and they've all been formatted with Disk Utility from the first initialisation, and as GPT as they're also bootable. No problems at all since the release of 10.9 on three 10.7 > 10.8 > 10.9 upgraded iMacs. And no WD software in play.

The point I was making in my original post was that the suspected WD software might have been installed at system level as early as 2007 (earliest compatible Macs) and just sat there, through system upgrades, and even if the original WD MyBook drive had long gone.

Given the hundreds of thousands of such WD units out there since then, and still on the shelf today (made a while ago), NOT ALL WHO METICULOUSLY REGISTER THEIR PURCHASES, and the millions of Mac users out there, many of whom also don't register, or keep their details up to date, it would be well-nigh impossible to contact them all whever they are to advise them of a potential issue, even if such an issue had been detected early in the piece. You would have to globally saturate traditional and new media to even begin to get the message across. Newspapers, radio, TV, social media, all over the world.

Given, too, many wouldn't have a clue what's what with their computers, or where to look, or what to look for - for many users, the first time they go check out the website or call for help is when something has already happened, not before. By then it's too late. I work in IT support, and I know this for a fact!

What has been the experience of those who have updated to Mavericks and then started doing backups afterwards (either Time Machine or Cloning drives)? Is everything OK or are the same problems occurring?

This query assumes NO 3rd party HD management software just Apple software formatted and Apple software managing the backup HD.

I format all HDs using Disk Utility and treat all HDs as if they were purchased from Apple and use no 3rd party software to manage them.

But if these procedures make no difference then we're all in a boatload of s_ _ _ e !

niteowl wrote:

What has been the experience of those who have updated to Mavericks and then started doing backups afterwards (either Time Machine or Cloning drives)? Is everything OK or are the same problems occurring?

I upgraded to Mavericks on my iMac 7,1 mid 2007. It has a 1TB Hitachi internal drive, a replacement for a WD drive that was showing signs of unreliability. It has a 2 TB WD Time Machine external back up.

The upgrade went very smoothly and I detected only one bug or anomaly - the Mail app perpetually synchronised with .Mac mail. This caused me to look for support, when I came across these threads about data loss.

I have suffered no data loss and the Time Machine back ups continued to operate properly, with older back ups as far as February this year still being available. I have never used any additional drive software, using Disk Utility to format the external drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), GUID Partition Table.

I have since reverted to Mountain Lion because the Mail flaw was driving me insane and I lost my bottle 😮 regarding WD drives. I used Mavericks for several days, however, without a data problem. My laptop is still running Mavericks but I have not connected that to any WD drives. It operates a Hitachi Gdrive without problems.

Hope this helps.

>niteowl

>What has been the experience of those who have updated to Mavericks and then started doing backups afterwards (either Time Machine or Cloning drives)?

In may case:

WD Studio Edition II 6TB (two hard disks, RAID 0) got nuked and renamed to "MyBook" ( a second "EFI" volume appeared for a second and then disappeared forever).

WD My Book Studio 2TB (single hard disk, non RAID) which has Time Machine on it kept working fine (no sleep issues either) before and after I removed the WD software.

forgottendiary said~....So by adding the entire /Volumes folder into Spotlight's privacy tab, any ext HD you plugin afterwards won't get indexed.

Its completely sensible that this is causative since Mavericks core overhaul point was spotlight/finder

If Mavericks is trying to Meta-tag connected external HD data (RAID or otherwise) and there is either a partition structure, or software (WD) interference,...I can easily see problems.

Just a logical theory,.......given the broad-spectrum nature of HD affected (certainly not just WD RAID or WD software related),... that this all stems to a possible OpenMeta fault.

Since MOST ALL of these reports of data corruption boil down to the complete loss of user defined meta-data, and that metadata is stored in extended attributes [Xattr],...Spotlight indexer may be initiated to add to (corrupt) the database for spotlight, letting it become searchable but ends up being corrupted.

Since openmeta uses setxattr()/getxattr(),......the question for the "Coders" is how is this causing a data corruption fault on external HD with Mavericks finder/spotlight?

Two WD drives. No loss of data. Both still backing up fine as always. Haven't changed anything except the mavericks OSX. Both drives 1TB.

Pete

Perhaps I have misunderstood, but isn't Spotlight metadata stored at the file system level, e.g. in the /.Spotlight-V100 folder?

If it is only metadata that disappears the disk catalog should still be intact (file & folder locations), since that is a feature of the partition structure?

Apologies if I am off the mark, but I thought the damage that was occurring was that the disks were re-partitioned. During that process any subsequent writes could overwrite the old catalog & partition data, I'd also imagine that the new /.Spotlight-V100 is added right after the botched re-partitioning, so that could become overwritten pretty quickly after the change.

Personally I'd be looking at ways to recover the old partition, so that the Spotlight data may be recoverable. Doing a file recovery will only gather the files if the tool only carves files by file headers. Most metadata will be a feature of the catalog (date changed, filename) but the xattrs will be set within the Spotlight DB.