El Capitan killed my WD MyBook

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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

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Answer 1

Best reply

Harhem73

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Oct 8, 2015 12:35 PM in response to Matt Bacon1

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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Answer 2

Oct 8, 2015 12:44 PM in response to Harhem73

It could also be that you previously installed the Western Digital drive software (that you shouldn't install), and the drivers are now incompatible with El Capitan, and blocking use of the drive.

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Answer 3

Harhem73

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Oct 8, 2015 12:48 PM in response to VikingOSX

OK, thanks for your reply, i will try to install WD drive software again and hope everything turns to normal again.

thanks again!

Harold

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Answer 4

schifrin

Level 1

18 points

Oct 10, 2015 9:18 PM in response to Harhem73

I'm working through this problem as I type this. A visit to the WD website was no help at all. A search through Google offered a note from WD, which WD claims was sent to all their users, NOT to install or not to run the WD Drive Utility under El Capitan. Never got it, and obviously discovered it too late to matter. Disk Utility repairs the drive(s) (mine is 4T with 4 partitions), they mount for about 5 seconds, and then unmount. Finally booting in Safe Boot plants them firmly on the desktop where they can be copied or cloned (I've done both, depending on the partition). I think the only thing left to do from here is initialize the drive and re-partition it using Disk Utility.

And, there was this note from WD regarding MyCloud drives and El Capitan:

http://support.wdc.com/KnowledgeBase/answer.aspx?ID=13182

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Answer 5

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Oct 10, 2015 9:21 PM in response to Harhem73

Harhem73 wrote:

OK, thanks for your reply, i will try to install WD drive software again and hope everything turns to normal again.

thanks again!

Harold

No, don't reinstall it, remove it and leave it that way.

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Answer 6

schifrin

Level 1

18 points

Oct 10, 2015 9:26 PM in response to Csound1

WAIT!!

The latest documents I can find from WD specifically warn against installing or running the WD Drive Utility. I assume that applies to the latest version posted on their website, as well.

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Answer 7

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Oct 10, 2015 10:02 PM in response to schifrin

Why do you think I advised removing it?

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Answer 8

schifrin

Level 1

18 points

Oct 10, 2015 11:13 PM in response to Csound1

You were correct -- I replied to the wrong message. Having just re-initialized and partitioned the drives using Disk Utility, they still wouldn't stay mounted, until I also removed the WD Utilities Helper from the Admin Account's Login Items. At least now I have clean drives that stay mounted without Safe Booting. I'm not sure what the helper app was calling, as I uninstalled the WD Utilities package --maybe an errant package or extension, but the uninstaller, which didn't remove the helper app as part of its process, worked.

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Answer 9

Nov 6, 2015 10:23 PM in response to Matt Bacon1

This glitch is costing not only myself but a lot of people money. I can't update files for work. I need to be able to fix this with out compromising the files on my HD.

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Answer 10

Harhem73

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0 points

Nov 7, 2015 4:36 AM in response to Matt Bacon1

TO ALL:

i can use my WD mbl with almost no problem.

all i do is to go:

finder - go - connect to server - afp:// ipaddress NAS

Good luck everyone!!😎

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Answer 11

Miz Kat

Level 1

4 points

Nov 11, 2015 8:03 AM in response to Harhem73

I am having the same problem. I upgraded yesterday to the lastest El Capitan (10.11.1) and it still doesn't work. My Book shows on the desktop and I can access the files, but when I go to Time Machine I get a backup failed message. If I click on "Details" I get this message:

Files can’t be copied onto the backup disk because it is read-only. You may need to repair or erase the disk using Disk Utility. If the disk can’t be repaired, select a different disk for backups.

Disk Utility cannot repair anything - found no issues. Disk Utility will not allow me to partition (it's greyed out). It's sounding like I need to completely erase it but I'm terrified of doing that.

I am NOT a computer genius, so I didn't understand the above post about going to finder...

Anyone have anything?!

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Answer 12

Csound1

Level 9

59,973 points

Nov 11, 2015 8:33 AM in response to Miz Kat

How is the drive formatted?

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Answer 13

Miz Kat

Level 1

4 points

Nov 11, 2015 11:02 AM in response to Csound1

I'm not sure how it's formatted. I'm pretty sure it was just plug and play, but that was two years ago and I can't really remember... I just always run it through Time Machine and have never had trouble. Is there a way for me to tell how it's formatted?

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