Q: Mybook studio raid 0, empty after installing Mavericks

I have used my disks for several years under Windows, Linux and OS X. I know for a fact that they where completely empty when I started using them on my Mac. I deleted all partitions when creating the raid using only Apples disk utility on a clean machine. I have never installed any WD software ever so unless the disks ships with some kind of malware which is not on a disk paritition and which can gain root privileges on the system and install something in the background without me knowing it, the WD software is not the problem - at least for me.

Sorry double post...

So I too have had this problem with two oldish WD Studio drives both 1TB and FW daisy chained to an Apple Thunderbolt to FW connector and using the WD Drive Manager software. The interesting thing is that it only impacted one of the two drives but has now done it twice!!! I think but can't be sure that on both occasions it was having done a system restart with the drives connected ...

The interesting thing on this is that it only impacted one drive on both occasions and not the other one - so having looked at both drives I established a difference between the way the two were formatted. The impacted one was formatted as GUID Partition Table i.e. enabling it as a booted device the unimpacted one was formatted as Apple Partition Map i.e. non-bootable. I have now reformatted impacted drive to use the Apple Partition Map and i will see if this prevents this from happening again. Although I will also avoid restarting my mac as well hopefully that will be avoid this happening!!

Anton did you notice the label 'MyBook' too?

I believe this is a very important detail to know as you never installed the WD software.

Thanks in advance!

Angelo

I don't really know how to see the label in the raided disks. However, if I look in the "System Report", I can see that both my drives have the following layout:

First drive:

  Volumes:

disk3s1:

  Capacity:          209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk3s1

  Content:          EFI

disk3s2:

  Capacity:          999.86 GB (999,860,912,128 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk3s2

  Content:          Apple_RAID

Boot OS X:

  Capacity:          134.2 MB (134,217,728 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk3s3

  Content:          Apple_Boot

  Volume UUID:          DA8D6D70-1B8B-383F-994E-AC08B3277833

Second drive:

  Volumes:

disk2s1:

  Capacity:          209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk2s1

  Content:          EFI

disk2s2:

  Capacity:          999.86 GB (999,860,912,128 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk2s2

  Content:          Apple_RAID

Boot OS X:

  Capacity:          134.2 MB (134,217,728 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk2s3

  Content:          Apple_Boot

  Volume UUID:          8CA278CC-EE0A-34F1-B0DB-2012F3C8CDB9

I installed Mavericks from a USB drive and my USB drive does also have this parition layout. However, if I delete the USB thumb drive and create the "Installer USB", this layout is not present. I also noted during the reboot of the installation that the USB thumb drives partition table had been changed.

My theory is that the installation process somehow rewrites the USB stick and also the USB devices. Changing things like this in the partition layout would screw up the raid for sure.

So I'm currently doing an experiment by reinstalling my Mac Mini from Mountain Lion to Mavericks with a clean usb drive and I have also attached a blank Seagate external drive to see if the partition layout changes.

We will see in about 30 mins.

I don't use any kind of raid so I don't know if Finder 'see' them in a different way, I think you should see them under Devices like any other disks but, as I said before, I don't know if something change while using raid disks (I don't think so anyway).

i contacted Apple Care today they had no idea what was going on , I pointed this discussion thread to them and they were surprised at the amount of hits here.

They do try , I think,  but were unable fix today. They tried a few fixes but did not work. So they have taken a drive capture report from my imac and are forwarding that to their engineers and say probably Monday before they will have any answers.

So I am a little more confident of a resolve now apple and wd are working on it.

I am surprised that Apple hasn't followed WD in advising customers of the problem .

Surely they should stop anymore people upgrading to Maverick.

My worry is family photos but imagine the heart aches this is causing small businesses.

I did point out to apple the massive amount of hits this thread has at the time it was just over 2 thousand they said only about 8 actual comments thogh.!  now 8 pages.!!

i think if you are affected you should post comment and this may initiat a little more urgency .

i will post any answers i get as soon as i get.

Angelo.M, they are not visible in Finder since they can not be mounted. If I look in disk utility, it just says something like "Raid slice for <name of raid>".

Regarding the experiment I did above, it didn't work. Neither thumb-driver nor Seagate disk got a rewritten partition table. I would have liked to try it with my WD disks but I don't want to screw up the chance to recover any data yet...

I was on the phone with Apple 2 days ago and they weren't much interested in this forum discussion. They said that for now they haven't received any communication from customers about this issue. I think that the people who have been affected by this bug should let Apple know how serious this problem is. WD instead promptly replyed to my email saying they are trying to understand what is happening. The fact that the drives affected by this problem were not only WD hdd and not everyone had the WD software installed makes me think that we are facing it is a bigger problem here.

Could someone else locate their disk in "About this mac > More info > System report > Hardware > USB > ..." and see if they have the same partitions as I do (EFI / Apple_Boot)?

What I think has happened to me is that the Mavericks installer thinks that my external drives are bootable disks and therefor has written the "Apple Boot" and "EFI" partitions to them after the installation. I believe that this is supposed to be written to the root drive and these partitions contains the recovery functionality where you can download and install the OS from the internet in case of some failure.

If not, maybe there are two different kind of problems?

Thank you for the info Anton, good to know that!

I'm not on Mavericks right now so I can't do the check you requested, I'll do it this evening (UTC +1) if no one will test it before.

My Passport 0748:

  Product ID:          0x0748

  Vendor ID:          0x1058  (Western Digital Technologies, Inc.)

  Version:          10.15

  Serial Number: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  Speed:          Up to 480 Mb/sec

  Manufacturer:          Western Digital

  Location ID:          0x26200000 / 2

  Current Available (mA):          500

  Current Required (mA):          500

  Capacity:          1 TB (1,000,170,586,112 bytes)

  Removable Media:          Yes

  Detachable Drive:          Yes

  BSD Name:          disk1

  Partition Map Type:          GPT (GUID Partition Table)

  S.M.A.R.T. status:          Not Supported

  Volumes:

EFI:

  Capacity:          209.7 MB (209,715,200 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk1s1

  Content:          EFI

disk1s2:

  Capacity:          999.83 GB (999,826,612,224 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk1s2

  Content:          Apple_CoreStorage

Boot OS X:

  Capacity:          134.2 MB (134,217,728 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk1s3

  Content:          Apple_Boot

  Volume UUID:          266F981E-007C-361F-A428-F93ABEF59E06

So, I guess that is the problem right. If i look at my main disc, it looks exactly the same:

  Volumes:

EFI:

  Capacity:          209,7 MB (209 715 200 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk0s1

  Content:          EFI

disk0s2:

  Capacity:          120,99 GB (120 988 852 224 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk0s2

  Content:          Apple_CoreStorage

Boot OS X:

  Capacity:          134,2 MB (134 217 728 bytes)

  BSD Name:          disk0s3

  Content:          Apple_Boot

  Volume UUID:          9F175A4E-DA94-3EEC-893C-E448EBE40687

Same EFI and Boot OS X partitions and same sizes. Now the question is why it is written to the external drives and whos fault it is.

I haven't updated to Mavericks yet I'm still using 10.8.5. After all this hubbub I'm leery to upgrade to Mavericks. After I have the backup HDs differently formatted I’ll be more ready to upgrade.

I'm using 2 Seagate Firewire HDs from OWC for Time Machine backups. I'm pretty sure they're both GUID formatted. Since one is not on site I'll not be sure 'till Friday. I will reformat the off site HD to Apple Partition Map and start re-using it as a Time Machine backup disc.

Should I, maybe, repurpose one of the TM backup HDs to a CLONE…? And what cloner has not had issues when used to revert to 10.8.5?

BUT... since they are Apple Encrypted I always have trouble erasing or reformatting them even when they’re properly mounted. I would appreciate guidance as how to revert the HD to its original state.

I don't know...BTW all my drives are fine. No DATA Loss (yet).