10.9.1 deleted external hard drive - warning

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Level 1

24 points

10.9.1 deleted external hard drive - warning

A friend just updated to 10.9.1, rebooted and has now lost his entire iTunes folder that was located on an external 4TB Seagate drive. All data in the iTunes folder seems to have disappeared - bizarrely the iTunes folder itself is still there, one other folder on the drive has been emptied and one is still intact, which is hard to figure out.

The drive had been reformatted to Mac OS Extended (Case-sensitive, Journaled) months ago when the drive was purchased and installed (in case that's of any relevance).

The drive checks out fine in Disk Utility.... I've checked in the Trash to see if they've somehow been deleted in the update process but to no avail.

Any thoughts/feedback/suggestions would be great as this is a pretty massive loss...

MacMini 2010 2.4GHz Dual Core, Mac OS X (10.7.2)

Posted on Dec 18, 2013 7:58 AM

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Answer 1

Dec 18, 2013 8:29 AM in response to Mark Adley

This problem has been widely reported with Western Digital and Seagate drives. A very serious matter. Losing all your music is bad enough but losing work could be catastrophic.

There is a very big discussion forum about this here - but which so far has been generating a great deal of heat, and not much light.

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Answer 2

Dec 18, 2013 10:08 AM in response to Mark Adley

Have your friend run Etrecheck to verify he has western digital software on his machine, which is causing the corruption

https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/48217/etrecheck

EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac. EtreCheck automatically removes any personally identifiable information from the output.

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Answer 3

Mark Adley Author

Level 1

24 points

Dec 19, 2013 2:43 AM in response to Tom in London

Cheers Tom, I skimmed through that thread and it seemed to be just about WD drives but I must admit I didn't read through all 71 pages 😊

I spoke to Apple tech last night and the guy said he wasn't aware of problems with Seagate drives until my call. He recommended I use a freeware app called PhotoRec http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec which boots from Terminal and seems to have recovered a lot of my files (I've yet to rebuild the drive to see what's there and what isn't).

Also a folder has appeared on the troubled Seagate external drive called 'lost+found' which contains a fair few of the missing files - I set PhotoRec to restore files onto a second external drive, so I'm not exactly sure where this 'lost+found' folder has come from.

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