I have an imac 27” late 2009 (i7 - 16Gb Ram) with High Sierra installed and two External HD Western digital firewire (one is a my studio 1TB and the other isa a My Studio II 2+2Tb in Raid 1 configuration).
I don’t know if it’s important, but yesterday I made an upgrade to my mac with an SSD installed in the super drive sata slot with a clean install of the High Sierra OS.
As soon I reconnected all my ext drives, everything runs fine. I also reinstalled the WD raid control (for the My Studio II) and it looks like that everything was correctly managed.
I worked, I used my ext drives (in which I store my data files - in the raid 1 one) and nothing strange happened. I went to bed leaving the mac on because it had to finish the upload on my dropbox and this morning I turned everything off without payng attention if something changed in my disk actually… but when I restarted the mac, the OS asked me if I want to use the firewire disks for the time machine!!!
I immediately figured out that something was running bad; both disk were completely erased. The name of the disks was “My Studio” as when they come out from the factory.
I’m astonished, all my data files are gone. I have, of course, another back up of the raw files, but I lost all the worked ones, the libraries, the completed jobs and so on.
This is a big, big, big problem for me.
Anyone encountered this problem? Anyone has a suggestion on what can be happened (because now, I did not trust the raid 1 anymore!).
Anyone has a suggestion on how I can recover my TOC data file (I hope the files are still there and only the table was erased).
Can you see your drive in the Disk Utility application of your Mac?
If it is showing up in Disk utility, We would recommend you to run First Aid on the drive.
Otherwise, It is a legacy drive, you can get an email support from WD for it. To get the support from WD, you can click on the link given below and create a support case for the issue.
Thank you very much.
Sorry for the delay in answering, but you will easly understand I was in trouble with attempts on recovering files.
This is my update:
I was able to reproduce the problem.
I left one of my two firewire HD as “target practice” and I started to do several try.
I found that every time I restart the mac nothing happened, meanwhile, if I completely stop the mac, wait some minutes and restart the system 9/10 times, the drive come on erased and with an EFI partition also mounted on my desktop.
This drive me to think that with the OS installed on the new SSD, the system is loaded too fast and the firewire chain (for some reasons that I really don’t understand) don’t have the time to be mounted correctly and the EFI of the firewire HD does not give the information of the volume. Therefore, files are there, but there is no information that drives you there.
The problem is not occurring if I use USB connection.
Even if I will solve the matter using USB and crying for the loss of my library and catalogues (files are ok at 90%, but video, catalogue and library results all corrupted or recovered in a not correct or complete way), I think that it is a very disappointing behaviour of the WD firewires control (ok, you will say that they are old, but protect a fault that prvent from the lost of everything I think is a major requirement, isn’t it?)
Thank you again for your reply,
