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Matt Bacon1 Author

Level 1

23 points

El Capitan killed my WD MyBook

OK, this could be a coincidence, but...

I've been using a 2TB Western Digital MyBook as my Time Machine back-up drive for a couple of years. It's worked flawlessly all that time. I upgraded to El Capitan two days ago in the evening, thinking that if it needed to do a large backup after the upgrade, then it could do so overnight. The last Mavericks back-up, at 22:21, worked fine. When I came back in the morning, I had a window saying "Back-up failed: there was a problem writing files to the disk Back Up". I think it suggested that I run Disk Utility to repair the drive. Anyway, that's what I did. When I ran Disk Utility, it started listing errors, and apparently correcting them (lots of orphans). Finally after about two hours (and maybe 50 errors detected) it told me in red that the drive could not be repaired, and that I would have to reformat it. Then, when I went to use "Erase", it told me that it couldn't erase the disk because it could not connect to it. Since then, the WD MyBook has refused to mount on the main Mac. But although the drive stubbornly will not appear on the desktop or in Disk Utility, if I go to Terminal and run [diskutil list] from the command line, it is listed as a device. Interestingly the ersatz "CD" of Western Digital Smartware which is stored on the drive does mount and function happily, which suggests that the drive hasn't had a catastrophic failure of heads or IO mechanism...

Also, in disk utility you can now see the usage of the drive. Before all this, if I hit "get info" on the drive, it told me that about 800GB was used, and there was 1.2TB free. After I upgraded to El Capitan, and first used the Disk Utility, it told me that I had only 500GB left (all the rest was "other"), and then, as the Disk Utility did its work, the "other" grew until it told me that the whole drive was full, 2TB, and I had no free space.

So either my drive was on its way out, and just happened to choose the moment I upgraded to El Capitan to terminate itself, or somehow my set-up of El Capitan, Time Machine, WD MyBook and Disk Utility has either trashed the drive or made it look as though it has.

Does any of this seem familiar?

Can anyone tell me exactly what the diskutil command line to reformat the drive in HFS+, Extended Journaled is (I don't know unix well enough, and I'm scared of what might happen if I get it wrong and re-format my main HD instead!).

Any other ideas how I can find out if the drive is really dead? (it won't appear on my also-upgraded Macbook Air, and I don't have a non-El Capitan Mac to hand)

Thanks for any help!

All the best,

Matt

Posted on Oct 5, 2015 3:22 AM

Top-ranking reply

Harhem73

Level 1

0 points

Posted on Oct 8, 2015 12:35 PM

Happened to me also... For the 2d time actually, ' cause also when I upgraded to Mavericks I went through this trouble for a while. Seems like te communication Apple -Wd is a one way street?

as before i solved this problem to connect to the NAS via finder-go-connect to server. Once there give a command afp://xxx.xxx.xxx.x (x = ip address NAS) after this you can access your WD NAS for a while.

WE just have to wait untill someome from WD wakes up and come with an update.

cheers,

Harold (the Netherlands)

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37 replies

Maikell

Level 1

39 points

Jan 2, 2016 6:18 AM in response to Csound1

@Csound1: Same issue here. But how do I remove the WD driver from my MyBook Thunderbolt Duo? Thanks for helping me out.

Csound1

Level 9

60,033 points

Jan 2, 2016 7:59 AM in response to Maikell

Contact WD and ask them how to remove their dreadful software from your Mac.

Maikell

Level 1

39 points

Jan 2, 2016 9:13 AM in response to Csound1

Thanks, but I had to do it the hard way because my two MyBook Thunderbolt Duo drives went nuts (mounted and unmounted forever in a loop).

Luckily I was able to backup all data out of Apple Disk Utility, then connect the drives to my MBP (still running Yosemite...) and re-format / re-partition them. On my iMac I deleted WD Drive Utility Helper (start objects) and uninstalled WD Drive Utility from my hard drive.

Hope this will solve the problems.

Jan 10, 2016 4:45 AM in response to Maikell

Had same issue.

After El Capitan installation my 1TB WD external usb drive was no more recognized.

Solved installing the Samsung NTFS low level driver found in another external 1TB usb drive: now it works fine!

estApple

Level 1

0 points

Feb 17, 2016 6:24 PM in response to mfidelman

Do not install the WD disk software. If you have, uninstall it COMPLETELY.

In fact, DO NOT install disk software from any manufacturer. Apple may change something that the manufactures may not aware of. So even it is OK now, there may be potential problems in future OS updates/upgrades.

Read this long thread: Mavericks corrupts external hard drive

It contains information on how to remove the WD disk software.

May 9, 2016 11:40 AM in response to estApple

HI, Today I finally solved the problem of Yoesmite / El Capitan with WD MyBookWorld Edition II and Time machine

Finally I can go in and use the part WD_Backup. it's work!

I have done so: from "Finder" ckiccate "command + k" or "afp: // wd_backup: backup@192.168.1.3/". (Instead of "192.168.1.3" you have to put the MyBook address on your LAN.)

I waited about an minto and then asked me the password which by default is "backup."

Soon after everything worked. Now I can use my WD MyBook World Edition II white light with Time Machine.

Hello to all.

PS:

Western Digital can not do that!

JimmyCMPIT

Level 7

29,258 points

May 9, 2016 11:45 AM in response to arckititta.com

p.s.s. if you are running a backup over the network when you could connect it directly to the host with a USB cable that about as effective as jumping into bear trap so you can run faster.

El Capitan killed my WD MyBook