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Mavericks corrupts external hard drives!

So I'm still a bit nervous to plug my WD MyBook into my MacBook, but I have a new Seagate Hybrid drive coming soon to install into my Mac, and my Time Machine back up is on this MyBook.

I imagine I might be safe since both partitions on the WD drive are OS Extended Journaled (checked on a non-Mavericks Mac) and I don't have any of WD's software installed at all.

(if they were RAID, that would be showing up in the Info for the drive, right?)

But I still need to/would much rather do one more Time Machine back up before putting in the new hard drive…
 
I am still trying to sort the mess out WD/Apple have left me in.

First two recovery attempts have failed, Now for the last day have been running Stellar Phoenix and so far its listing lost files, the test will be to see if I can get them on another drive and use them.

I am annoyed with this to say the least, I have tuned off all my external drives no matter what the make is as I cant afford any more issues, I thought windows only had these major issues not the trusty old Mac OS
 
I did a regular upgrade to mavericks and it was a little buggy so I wanted to do a clean install - I did a backup on my 3TB 3.0 WD external through time machine, wiped my rMBP, fresh Mavericks install and tried to bring everything back - the drive got corrupted. Luckily I had another backup on a seagate drive but that was just because I have a ton of RAW photos not edited on my macbook - normally I don't do 2 backups.

I wouldn't use a WD just yet :-O
 
Got my files back using Stellar Phoenix, but missing original files names, and in no order.

Now I guess I need to look at sorting the mess out, nor looking forward to looking through hundreds of videos and working out when and where they were taken.
 
bobright said:
Oh wow seriously was it a WD Elements by any chance? I have a WD Elements 1.5TB that I do CCC clones with that I'm now scared to use.
Click to expand...

It was a WD Scorpio Blue 1TB. OWC bought from macsales. Connected using thunderbolt to FW800 adapter. And it was an encrypted time machine backup drive.

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bobright said:
Oh wow seriously was it a WD Elements by any chance? I have a WD Elements 1.5TB that I do CCC clones with that I'm now scared to use.
Click to expand...

old-wiz said:
ugh..I have a couple of WD externals, so I think I'll hold off on going to Mavericks until I hear more about this. Maybe the issue is only the WD provided software - I would never use the software provided by the drive maker; stick to osx disk utility to partition/modify.
Click to expand...

FWIW I never used any WD software.
 
devman said:
It was a WD Scorpio Blue 1TB. OWC bought from macsales. Connected using thunderbolt to FW800 adapter. And it was an encrypted time machine backup drive.

----------





FWIW I never used any WD software.
Click to expand...
Yikes has a WD crapped out on anybody else? I still have NOT backed up my last backup is OS X Lion.
 
Has anybody had or heard of anyone having a WD drive crap out on them that was Extended Journaled, no WD software installed, and connected through USB?

The common factors I'm picking up with most all of these reports is that there is either the WD software installed, or the disk is formatted as RAID, or it's connected through FireWire or some combination of all of these.

Has anyone experienced something outside of these factors?
 
Just to confirm, this issue is only on Western Digital drives and NOT any other branded external hard drives?

Was thinking of backing up my MBP on a Seagate using Time Machine tonight. :(
 
ukspeedtraps said:
I am still trying to sort the mess out WD/Apple have left me in.

First two recovery attempts have failed, Now for the last day have been running Stellar Phoenix and so far its listing lost files, the test will be to see if I can get them on another drive and use them.

I am annoyed with this to say the least, I have tuned off all my external drives no matter what the make is as I cant afford any more issues, I thought windows only had these major issues not the trusty old Mac OS
Click to expand...

funny i found this thread today. i have a 1TB WD passport, i only have about 200gb of data on there. when i connected my ext yesterday i could not get my macbook pro to read it. i tired restarting my mac several times.

i left the drive plugged in and opened up disk utility, but disk utility was showing the drive as full/zero free space. the hard drive was showing in disk utility but not on my desktop as it normal does. i verified disk status and attempted to run disk repair, i got an error message the first time. i ran disk repair again and got another error message but this time the status bar moved further. i ran disk repair (2) more times and it finally it repaired successfully and all my data was intact. i was worried and ******** bricks there for a few minutes bc all my excel/word docs, movies, music, pics, time machine backups were on this hard drive.

keep trying disk repair, it worked on the fourth time for me.

ETA: my hard drive was encrytped, i would get the password prompt when plugging it in but i was unable to hit enter after typing the password. Hard drive was connected thru USB
 
My Experience with Data Lost

When I decided to back up my new MacBook Pro 13' Mavericks OSX 10.9 with Time Machine, little did I know by pressing "encrypt" it would AUTOMATICALLY start deleting all of my other files in my LaCie 1 TB External Hard-drive. In a matter of 30 seconds, ALL of my 600 GB worth of photos, documents, music, movies, my dissertations, my private documents - were deleted.

There was no prompt, no warning, no NOTHING that - that was what it was going to do. Had I have known that, I would have never encrypted my Time Machine backup.

I am devastated. 10 years of my digital life, some of the most critical moments of my life, all of my world travels - were wiped with one click.

APPLE absolutely need to have a prompt warning people what "ENCRYPT" will actually do. Absolutely unacceptable.

Now I have nothing left. I felt like a fire took everything I had.
 
Check out a program called Disk Warrior - works real good.

Esotera said:
When I decided to back up my new MacBook Pro 13' Mavericks OSX 10.9 with Time Machine, little did I know by pressing "encrypt" it would AUTOMATICALLY start deleting all of my other files in my LaCie 1 TB External Hard-drive. In a matter of 30 seconds, ALL of my 600 GB worth of photos, documents, music, movies, my dissertations, my private documents - were deleted.

There was no prompt, no warning, no NOTHING that - that was what it was going to do. Had I have known that, I would have never encrypted my Time Machine backup.

I am devastated. 10 years of my digital life, some of the most critical moments of my life, all of my world travels - were wiped with one click.

APPLE absolutely need to have a prompt warning people what "ENCRYPT" will actually do. Absolutely unacceptable.

Now I have nothing left. I felt like a fire took everything I had.
Click to expand...
 
NameUndecided said:
Has anybody had or heard of anyone having a WD drive crap out on them that was Extended Journaled, no WD software installed, and connected through USB?

The common factors I'm picking up with most all of these reports is that there is either the WD software installed, or the disk is formatted as RAID, or it's connected through FireWire or some combination of all of these.

Has anyone experienced something outside of these factors?
Click to expand...

I have a WD Elements 2TB (single drive) connected through USB (no WD software installed). It works perfect with Time Machine on my 2012 iMac with Mavericks :)
 
devman said:
I have an external WD 1TB drive that was a time machine backup device. It was corrupted yesterday by Mavericks and the drive is now lost. Neither Drive Genius or Diskwarrior or Disk Utility could recover it. FWIW.
Click to expand...

same problem here. i tried via disk management to erase the disk / read it somehow and was stuck at "could not unmount it" .

Also the external hdd can be "seen" by the disk manager as well as on a windows 7 machine that i plugged it, i heard the "clink" noise that the windows are doing when an usb is being plugged and neither a hdd could be seen nor i could do anything about it. only by using a disk manager i could check the disk (temperature and s.m.a.r.t. status) but NOTHING ELSE.

So atm i have an 750gb external WD Book HDD that is only shows that is only reading and is actually DEAD
 
ive not had a problem yet myself on my wd products and the raid manager is still running on my mac mini late 09 model for my mybook studio 2 the good thing is i have the drive backed up in 2 places at my house i hate cloud storage
 
I took the risk to connect my WD MyBook for Time Machine and all is just fine.

I have two partitions on the drive -- one for regular storage and the other for Time Machine. Both are formatted in Mac OS Extended Journaled and I have never had any WD software installed. The drive is also connected through a USB hub, if that could make any difference at all.

So I used it to do a time machine backup, installed a new hard drive in my macbook (seagate hybrid drive), fresh installed Mavericks on the new hard drive and used the time machine drive again. Before and after, everything seems fine.

I've read some posts of people saying it was fine for a couple of days and then it went to shoes. So I think I'll still use it sparingly for the time being.

*Also, my computer is a 2009 13inch MacBook Pro.
 
seagate 3tb wiped / reformatted.

i did have the WD drive manager on the affected mac mini - did this software do it?

the Seagate Utility no longer recognises the drive as Seagate.

Over 100,000 hi res song files.......gone.....gone....gone. my whole iTunes library.....gone....gone....gone.
 
troutmouth said:
i did have the WD drive manager on the affected mac mini - did this software do it?

the Seagate Utility no longer recognises the drive as Seagate.

Over 100,000 hi res song files.......gone.....gone....gone. my whole iTunes library.....gone....gone....gone.
Click to expand...

That's why you need to make backups.
 
Some quotes from the Apple forum >>>

I reported it via radar on June 25 (14256955). Happened right after I installed an early Mavericks prerelease. Rebooted, and my Time Machine drive (MyBook connected via FW800) was wiped.

I was able to reproduce the data loss using both FW800 and USB connections, by the way.

I responded to a few requests for more info from Apple, and provided the WD software to Apple. I don't know where the ball was dropped. I was hoping Apple would notify WD, but it doesn't appear that WD has done much of anything, so who knows when they heard about it.

Incidentally, in June I removed the WD software, made peace with my loss of data, and have been running the same disk drive without problems ever since, on Mavericks.
Click to expand...
I first reported this issue to Western Digital on 13th September (yes black friday) while using Mavericks Developer Preview 7.

There is an earlier report in the developer forums on Developer Preview 6 titled DP6 Partition/Data loss Promise Technology Pegasus R4 Thunderbolt RAID.

That report was filed with Apple as radar #15076993.

https://devforums.apple.com/message/875652 (developer access required)
Click to expand...
"Mavericks is also to blame as it allowed such a destructive process to execute annonomously."

The Western Digital software was probably given those permissions when it was installed, so that it can do its low-level disk access that it needs to do to serve its actual purpose.
Click to expand...
Source:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5475136?start=210&tstart=0
 
Latest WD news:
 

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Western Digital Software currupts Seagate 3tb and DroboS 10tb

A few days ago I also experienced this issue with two of my drives. I can confirm that this issue affects multiple brands and not just western digital drives. The first drive affected was a 3tb Seagate internal drive which all of a sudden monted as "MyBook" and was erased. A few day later after a normal computer restart of my Mac Pro, my 10tb Drobo S did the same thing. It mounted as "MyBook" and all files were erased.

As you can imagine I was in a sort of panic and immediately called western digital and after spending 2 hours on the phone and speaking with multiple people my issue is not resolved and they have no solution. I can not begin to imagine having to recover 13tb of data and reorganize all the files. I will hold WD accountable!

I have since uninstalled all WD software from my computers.
 
I'm sure the data is still recoverable (although file names and folder structure may be lost). I wonder if either of the drive we NTFS or FAT formatted and not Mac formatted? Either way, it's unlikely the entire drive was erased, but just the partition/file structure info.
 
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