All data gone on My Book Studio II

True, all RAID setups appear affected, including all the WD MyBook

even Seagate RAID are corrupted with total loss of metadata, dont connect any MyBook to Mavericks, or any RAID

We are looking into this right now.

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I removed WD folders from Library/Application Support and all files with WD in their names from System/Library/Extensions. Finally the WD Drive Manager does not show up in the menu when I connect the formatted MyBook Studio Ed II 6TB.

BTW my Time Machine is on a 2TB single hard disk WD My Book drive and it’s working fine under Mavericks with and without the WD software. “seriously” said that his WD RED disk has not been affected but his WD GREEN disk on the same dock has been formatted to “MyBook”. I wonder if this could be a Red/Green problem as well as a RAID problem.

I’m another pissed off WD user.

I have just lost 10TB of data. All the contents of a 6TB WD and a 4TB Seagate drives have been wiped out. Both HDs have been renamed “MyBook”.

I’m not sure if I should wait for a solution from Apple or WD or if I should start trying to recover the data with Data Rescue or Disk Drill. Any thoughts?

Thanks.

OK, I took a peek inside my ruined 6TB RAID drive and the unaffected 2TB single disk drive, they are all WD GREEN disks. So it looks like that’s not an issue.

C’mon WD and Apple already! We are dying here!

— Updated November 6, 2013 —

On October 30th, 2013 Western Digital informed registered customers of affected products via E-mail regarding reports of Western Digital and other external HDD products experiencing data loss when updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9).  Our investigation to date has found that for a small percentage of customers that have the WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager and/or WD SmartWare software applications installed on their Mac, there can be cases of a repartition and reformat of their Direct Attached Storage (DAS) devices without customer acknowledgement which can result in data loss.  

 

WD has been tracking this issue closely through our WD Forum and through our Technical Support hotline and the occurrence rate of this event has been very low.  A specific set of conditions and timing sequences between the OS and the WD software utilities has to occur to cause this issue.  Should this event occur, the data on the product can likely be recovered with a third party software utility if the customer stops using the device immediately after the OS X Mavericks (10.9) upgrade.  WD will be issuing updated versions of these software applications that resolve this issue.

 

WD strongly urges our customers to uninstall these software applications before updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9), or delay upgrading until we provide an update to the applications.  If you have already upgraded to Mavericks,  WD recommends that you remove these applications and restart your computer.  If you have already upgraded to Mavericks and are experiencing difficulty in accessing your external hard drive,  please do not save anything to the drive, disconnect the drive from your computer, and contact Western Digital Customer Service at http://support.wdc.com/contact/.

— Updated November 5, 2013 —

There are reports of Western Digital and other external HDD products experiencing data loss when updating to Apple’s OS X Mavericks (10.9).  Western Digital is urgently investigating these reports and the possible connection to the WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager and WD SmartWare software applications.  Until the issue is understood and the cause identified, WD strongly urges our customers to uninstall these software applications on their systems before updating to OS X Mavericks (10.9), or delay upgrading.  If you have already upgraded to Mavericks, WD recommends that you remove these applications and restart your computer. WD has removed these software applications from our web site solely as a precaution as we investigate this issue.

If you have already upgraded to Mavericks and are experiencing difficulty in accessing your external hard drive, please do not save anything to the drive, disconnect the drive from your computer, and contact Western Digital Customer Service at http://support.wdc.com/country/ for further assistance.

You can now download the WD Software Uninstaller.  This utility will remove Mac WD SmartWare and WD Drive Manager software.  You can find the uninstaller under any of the Mac Drive Downloads sections such as the My Book Studio below.

http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=124&sid=214&lang=en

It happen to me as well, lost 2TB of data last year.

WD send my drive for data recover, the end result is prerry bad, only 200mb++ of references files, nothing can be use again. Complaint to WD support, no answer given.

Worst case is, the replacement drive act funny again, report & request for replace dive on 13 Aug, till now still pending for arrangement to pick up.

For me, All external HDD work fine on Mavericks with or without WD software (for a week).

*But the problem start after I turn-on Time Machine and start first backup after upgraded to Mavericks, all data 4 partitions on my external HDD(with Time Machine backup partition) wiped out and show itself as new one!

I think the killer is not WD software but The Time Machine on Mavericks + Mac extended journaled.

Anyone can confirm that your problem start after Time Machine backup, and only the External HDD with Time Machine Backup? (or not?) 

In my case I never used Time Machine, it is always turned off since it was introduced to OS X. It is for sure not Time Machine problem, at least not in my case. 

I may be wrong, but based on other posts in this forumm and Apple Discussions forums the problem affects mostly large capacity WD Green drives with IntelliPower. Maybe the culprit is IntelliPower - reports of drives not going to sleep may support this. Just my 2 cents…

Shame, not kudos, to WD for waiting ages before working on the issue and taking action/communications to customers.

The issue is crucial, so why waiting again before spreading a warning on WD site and to the tech press?

One -late- mail to registered customers is not enough. Send the same to tech sites and press!

We are losing data, you’re losing reputation and customers.

I’ve got email from WD. It confirms the problem and suggests to uninstall WD Drive Manager.

I called WD and he said its due to non compatibilty to the latest OS. And he said all can be resumed to normal if used under the previous OS. I have high hope and go back home to try. BUT it is still not work.

Well this is frustrating seeing that it is supposedly “confirmed” to be WD Drive Manager since I have no WD software installed.

I also tried the disks under Mountan Lion which does not work since the partition is already screwed up…

(But who knows, maybe there are two different problems…)

WD has recommended to uninstall any WD software (in my case, the WD drive manager). The only way to do so properly is to use the installer, which has an uninstall option. BUT, that software has been removed from the website. What to do now?

Best.

I used Clean My Mac to uninstall this. It finds almost every bit of the chosen software. 
With Easy Find you can search for leftovers. 

Doing a sudo find, the items I found are at these locations:

    /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.wdc.drivemanagerservice.plist

    /Library/Application Support/WesternDigital

The first one is a daemon that you’ll need to unload with this command:

    sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.wdc.drivemanagerservice.plist

To verify it’s been unloaded, execute this command:

    sudo launchctl list | grep -i wdc

Next, remove the daemon descriptor file:

    sudo rm /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.wdc.drivemanagerservice.plist

After that, remove the folder.  Either copy/paste this exactly or make sure you type it exactly since the “rm” (remove) command doesn’t just put things in the Trash, and the recursive/force (R and f) options can be dangerous if you give it the wrong path to remove.

    sudo rm -Rf ‘/Library/Application Support/WesternDigital’

I’m using my My Book Studio II by way of eSATA (PC Card in a MacBook Pro 17") rather than USB or FireWire, but I do remember that to configure it after buying it, I had to plug it in as USB rather than as FireWire or eSATA, so my guess is that the problem may be due to the device being plugged in by another manner than USB, and Mavericks somehow is doing something different with the IO registry than the software expected, causing the WD software to send a reconfigure or erase command.  If anyone has had these problems with a USB connection, please add that to this forum.  If not, feel free to include what connection you had that was present upon loss.  Thankfully I haven’t upgraded to Mavericks yet.

If you have experienced data loss with the following criteria then please open support cases with both Western Digital and Apple support:

  • MacOS Mavericks 10.9
  • WD Drive Manager / Raid Manager software installed
  • data loss after a restart
  • drives initialised to a single MyBook partition with exposed EFI partition
  • loss of all existing partitions and directory structures

If you are an Apple developer then please report an issue with Apple Bug Reporter and reference #15360478.

I have just finnish running Stellar Phoenix, which I think is one of the best data recovery software, and the unthinkable happened - it hasn’t found a single file in the 4TB and 6TB drives.

I am trying Data Rescue now but I’m already panicking.

Have you guys got a good result with any data recovery?


Stormstereo wrote:

WD has recommended to uninstall any WD software (in my case, the WD drive manager). The only way to do so properly is to use the installer, which has an uninstall option. BUT, that software has been removed from the website. What to do now?

 

Best.


To completely uninstall the WD Drive Manger from your Mac, open a terminal window and issue the following commands in order:

 

sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.wdc.WDDMservice.plist

 

sudo rm -R /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.wdc.drivemanagerservice.plist

 

sudo rm -R /var/tmp/com.WD.WDDriveManagerService

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I already just moved the WD Application to the trash and emptied the trash.  Was this a big mistake?

Any word on when a fix will be coming and if it will be coming from WD or from Apple?

Thank you.