Installed new HD on Mid-2009 MBP, installed Mavericks, now getting "error code -50" after being on for a while.

I have the same problem with Mid-2009 MBP and WDC WD5000BEVT-24A0RT0 (replaces the stock HDD). It began some or more days after upgrading from OS X 10.8 to 10.9, there were no issues before. I have suspected the foolish force restart I made when one probably system process made the computer unresponsive for some hours already, it was not mds as I remember and the process continued after restarting I guess. It takes too much time to test reinstalling everything including a lot of MacPorts ports and moving files back and forth, but I am already thinking about doing that soon.

It has been my observation that WD black drives are preferred to the blue and green ones on these forums. It may be to your advantage if you can make a switch. (I do not use WD HDDs)

I would check to see if the WD HDD has its own Sudden Motion Sensor. If so, it may be coming in conflict with the one in the Mac. If that is the case, I suggest disabling the SMS in the Mac.

Ciao.

JakeRidesAgain,

this could be indicative of a faulty internal SATA cable. Do you have an external drive enclosure, or a SATA-to-USB or SATA-to-FireWire cable? If so, try putting your original 320 MB hard drive into your external enclosure, or attach it to your SATA-to-whatever cable, attach it to your MacBook Pro, and boot while holding down an Option key — this will give you a list of drives from which to boot. Pick your external drive, and do some stuff while booted from the external drive. If it behaves normally, then that could point to your internal SATA cable as the culprit.

Reteep,

you could try the same thing as well.

Thank you for the tips!

OGELTHORPE wrote:

I would check to see if the WD HDD has its own Sudden Motion Sensor. If so, it may be coming in conflict with the one in the Mac. If that is the case, I suggest disabling the SMS in the Mac.

WD5000BEVT does indeed have it's own protection:

ShockGuard™ - Leading-edge ShockGuard technology combines firmware and hardware advancements to protect the drive mechanics and platter surface to meet the highest combined shock tolerance specifications required for mobile and notebook applications.

Source: http://www.wdc.com/en/company/pressroom/releases/?release=3cd471a1-66be-46ba-9f6 7-e15298b0f8a0

Even though I read about it I had not touched any SMS settings in OS X since I did not have any problems before. I disabled SMS in Mac, let's see now.

Melophage wrote:

this could be indicative of a faulty internal SATA cable. /.../

Reteep,

you could try the same thing as well.

In my case I doubt it is the problem because it worked fine before Mavericks, although forcing restart may have done something. I hope disabling SMS helped.

Disabling SMS did not help, the problem has occured again twice in the last two days.

It appears that even though WD5000BEVT has ShockGuard, it does not have Free Fall Sensor:

http://www.datarecoverytools.co.uk/drsdownloads/Western%20Digital%20Model%20Numb ers.pdf

SMS seems to be combination of those two:

http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1935

Disabling SMS seems to add some lag that I hadn't understood before when the laptop gets moved. Also, I suspect that battery life increased, but I am not that sure yet.

I tried both steps described here onwards, but the problem still occurs (I had over 5000 such files):

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5419668?answerId=23325835022#23325835022

Be careful when trying step 2 yourself, I saw forum threads where it says that it forces Time Machine to back up everything again and therefore may cause inconvenience dumping old backups or/and increasing space used.

Additional information I noticed:

$ macerror -50

Mac OS error -50 (paramErr): error in user parameter list

To test: try in external enclosure; new user account; reinstall OS X without reverting settings from backups.

Thank you for the SATA cable hint! I checked around the web and it seemed to be quite fragile indeed, so I decided to try replacing it as well (it was quite expensive piece). So far it seems to have fixed it.