Warning: WD Raid Manager wiped out all of my data! 12TB

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
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If you use WD Drive Utility and specifically the WD Raid Manager…Don’t!

I have a WD Studio Edition II that I have been using for years on our MacMini Server. Been working like a charm. The other day, I connected it to my Mac Pro to transfer files to my 12TB Promise Pegasus2 R4 RAID (RAID 5). Once again - it worked like a charm. All the files transfered perfectly. The next morning when I launched my MacPro I got a message asking if I wanted to use the drive MyBook as a Time Machine Drive. That was my first clue. I have no drive named MyBook. The WD RAID software had COMPLETELY wiped out my Pegasus RAID! All 12TB. It reformatted it as a RAID and named it MyBook. There was a second drive (small) mounted on the desktop call EFI.

I have put in a support request from Western Digital but haven’t heard back. I searched the forums and saw that several years back, people were having this exact same problem. Not acceptable!

If anyone has any solutions on how I might be able to recover my Pegasus RAID - I would greatly appreciate it. In the meantime, I’m looking into what recourse I have with WD.

Frustrated and angry…

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Hello and welcome to the WD Community.

Have you tried using a data recovery software to see if you can get the data from the drive?

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I tried data recovery using Data Rescue 4 …and it only recovered fragments.

The story gets worse. Today I plugged in a different drive - a Seagate Backup Plus on a second machine (Mac Mini Server) where I also had WD RAID utility installed.

  • it mounted on the desktop

  • within seconds, it unmounted. For a minute I thought the drive was faulty.

  • it remounted as a newly formated WD MyBook, with a secondary EFI volume.

THIS IS EXACTLY HOW IT APPEARED WHEN IT LOST ALL OF THE DATA ON MY PEGASUS RAID AS WELL

This is unbelievable…now a total of 14TB of data have been lost due to the WD Raid Manager.

It doesn’t happen when I mount any WD drives. It seems to happen when I mount ANY non-western digital drives.