External harddrive won't shut down in Mavericks

I have 2 Seagate Drives, 2 Lacie Drives, and 2 Western Digital Drives attached to my early 2008 17" MacBook Pro. Most of my file system was connected via Firewire 400. After installing Mavericks all of the Firewire system disappeared from my desktop. By converting the connections to USB I was able to mount 3 of the drives. 2 of the drives were encrypted with Filevault 2 and I had to utilize Terminal to unencrypt them. When I connected them via USB they mounted and were readable. Yesterday at the end of the dayI had all of my drives mounted and accessable. My wife told me that her Desktop image had changed to a big wave. I replied that Apple had probably made that image the default (Mavericks is a Big Wave surfing area in Northern California). This morning I went to restore her original desktop image. All of my hard drives are unmounted and thus far I am unable to mount them. Here's my advice to Apple, do not take the external drive coding group out for beer and pizza.

same with my late 2008 imac 27" and an external LaCie / WD raid drive on firewire 800. Need to completely shut down to stop hd spinning. come on apple !!!

Same issue here. MBP (mid 2011) with an external raid drive from LaCie (over FW800). Mountain Lion gave me no problems. Also anxiously waiting for a fix...

This addition to my previous post. My Time Machine backup is kept on a LaCie drive which was attached via Firewire. It now is attached via USB. When all of my drives disappeared I used various methods to get them remounted. The logical Partitions were unencrypted by Control clicking on the partition name in Disk Utility and selecting Unencrypt Partition from the list. I wasn't able to get my Time machine to mount again until I unencrypted the logical partition this way. It appears that Mavericks does not want to handle external drives that were encrypted by previous OSs. I wonder what will happen if I encrypt a drive with Mavericks? Id like to return my file system to Firewire with selected disks encrypted. It appears that it will be at least a month before that can happen.

Sleep seems to work now for the external LaCie I boot off.

No changes other than a reboot.

Are you running the LaCie disk over FW800 as well?

Booting off a LaCie via USB 2.

I just posted the same issue, then I found this thread. Mine will shut down with a system shut down, but will not go to sleep. Even with the system asleep

@All:

When all external disks are formatted correctly, OSX can use them and handle them.

Uninstall all softwares that were delivered with the disks, be it WD software, Lacie software, and so on: these softwares are not necessary, and most of them are not compatible enough to be issue free in Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks.

(exclude Raid software for raids).

After the removal of the softwares restart the computer.

TimeMachine: do NOT install TM schedulers or other TM handlers.

Lex

I have never ever installed any third party software and everything worked until Mavericks...so that cant be the solution...

I have 3 x 1TB Seagate External Drives that originally would spin down and sleep, or turn off when ejected. They don't have any 3rd party software associated with them — they are just formatted. One is used with Time Machine for system backup. All of them have to be ejected and unplugged to shut down. This has only been an issue since my upgrade to Maverick OS version 10.9

Same here as antares86. No vendor specific software ever installed. The problem lies in Mavericks, not the disk itself.

Do the SystemPreferences/EnergySaver settings change it?

No, it doesn't have any effect on external drives.

Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

Feedback