Serious external drive problems after installing Mavericks

I am in the same dreadful place - my WD HD worked for a while but then it is not even showing up in my Disk Utilities - Mavericks OS is the worst thing ever to have happened to MAC- I wish I had never downloaded the thing - where do I find someone who can recover the contents of my WD hard drive ? There is pretty critical stuff on there .

Am calling Apple tomorrow - I think they should be made to recover the data for free - there is clearly a serioius problem in Mavericks and I dont see why we should be the ones that pay for it !

Ok , well , the good news is that I have taken APPLE to task on this and they are going to attempt to recover my data for free ! I just have to get the drive to them . So , if you have suffered loss of data from MAVERICKS then point it out and ask them to put it right . Result for a change - 4 hours on the phone to the TECH guys in Portugal today but some problems solved - nice guys too !

I have a MacBook and an external IOmega HD (with internally an Samsung 2TB HD). I am using this setup with Lightroom/Photoshop so all my photos are stored on this external drive (with backup to a Windows PC and in the cloud).

So far, I haven't lost any data - directly - on it but it's (almost) impossible to import images from the Canon and store them on the external drive (it takes ages). Import to the local HD goes very well but copying the files to the external drive is a nightmare as well. Lightroom is able to open the past photos but as we all now, Lightroom is not altering the images themself but keeping the changes in the catalogue (which is on the local HD).

Since the update to Mavericks, the internal HD went corrupt. Has it something to do with the new OS? Hard to say. One thing is for sure, the external drive is useless so my work on photography has halted and I'm converting everything towards a PC now. I'm also unable to copy the images to their storage.

There is a process running on my computer called "wdhelper". It can be seen in the activity monitor. I would like to find this process and delete it. Anyone know how I can do that? A spotlight search returns no results...

Same problem with my passport WE. I'm so sad 😟 Cant believe this happened! Any official solution?

Western Digital sent out an email several days ago addressing the problem with software updates that are on their website. If I understood the entire email the new software would recover the lost data. But you will have to go to their website to verify that. Myself, I never installed the WD software on my computer and therefore my WD hardrives never stopped functioning. My passport holds my IPhoto and my ITunes and all is well, my other WD hardrive is 1 terabyte and I use it as my back up and it to is still functioning.

Mine was all well until today, a 2TB WD MyBook without any WD software installed on my system, though I do see a 'wdhelper' and a 'WDMyBookService' in my Activity Monitor that I most definitely did not put there. And I've been running Mavericks since shortly after it was released, no issues at the time of the upgrade. All my iTunes media was on the drive. Gone. My guess is that it occurred during a restart today. I've been using the computer all day and just noticed that my iTunes volume 'Big Music' had been renamed 'MyBook'. Disk utility shows it as having no files and 2TB of free space. Haven't tried it on a non-Mavericks machine yet. So is there no external drive enclosure that is safe at this point?

Sorry Darth. In any case "wdhelper" is not WD software and it is needed by your MAC.

I wonder if updating to X.9.1 helps?

I did figure that out and kept it running, thanks. Haven't updated to 10.9.1 yet, probably will give it a shot tomorrow.

Hi Gary B

I've same problem like you. On the 26/01/2014 I've upgraded Mavericks. Before upgrade I've copied all my uni works, pictures and movies to my Maxtor external hard drive using two partition Storage 1 and storage 2. I also checked that the copied files works properly. After Maverick upgrade I connected my external hard drive with mac and i only see storage 1 with all files. storage 2 has files in the folders but all files with 0 bytes. I tried to connect diconnect sevral times but no luck. Ive lost all important data of storage 2. Please help me how to recover my files back. Ive been reading all forum since last 2days but couldnt find right solution. I think my hard drive not been used regularly and its corrputed and damaged. Is there any particular solution to recoved files.

I recommend Disk Drill (you can check whether the recovered files in the free version) or DataResсue.

Alex

Apple Support Professional

I recommend Disk Drill

Out of curiosity: are you affiliated with that company/developer?

No, I recommend two different programs from various developers that I use has been for many years to recover data from hundreds of users' computers. I've been doing data recovery since the time of PPC and express their opinion only and not commercial.

Of course using these programs I write developers of problems found with their programs and have early access to beta versions of many DIY recovery software.

Alex

Apple Support Professional