Critical Issue on WD drives with OSX Mavericks

seriously · October 15, 2015, 1:29am

Hi,

after connecting an external WD drive to Mavericks, the system initialize it with a new “EFI” partition and a new EMPTY “MyBook” partition.

This is what happens to many people with many different configurations (raid, usb, thunderbolt, etc…).

My experience here:

Two days ago i bought 2 brand new WD Green 1TB drives. Connected one to my MacBookPro running Mountain Lion via a USB3 dock from Orico, formatted as Mac Ext Journaled. Than copied the content of two 500GB drives to this 1TB drive. All was ok (and unfortunately i formatted the two 500GB drives after copy).

Yesterday i’ve upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks. Then i connected the (above) drive and the system automatically initialized it to a new EFI partition and a new “MyBook” partition, EMPTY. All automatic, no questions!

No WD software were installed on my mac. I’ve just run some drive firmware upgrades months ago, but nothing marked WD was on Application folder. Searched infos on the net, with no help from Apple or WD.

Then i removeed from /library/extensions the 4 files from WD and connected the other brand new WD Green drive. Same thing: automatically formatted as “MyBook” at first connection.

The “funny” thing is that it’s not a MyBook, it’s just a WD Green drive on a usb3 external dock!

But the same thing happens to people with all kind of WD drives, with or without raid, and with different interfaces.

Still not a word from WD?

seriously · October 15, 2015, 2:57am

When i connected the dock to Mavericks, i had 1 WD Green and 1 WD RED on the same dock. Only the Green drive was affected by the initialization as “MyBook”, the RED drive is ok. That makes sense as all MyBook drives/raids contain Green drives.

There is something by WD, installed in the pre-Mavericks OS that formats Green drives as MyBook after upgrading to Mavericks. This happens to drives formatted both HFS or NTFS or anything, it’s just a matter of drive model, not of drive content.

So keep Green drives avay from Maverick upgraded systems, imho to stay safe. Try Mavericks fresh install instead and avoid WD utilities. My 2 cents.

As for what is the cause and how to recover lost data, i’m still waiting for a word from WD. Missing.

MacGuru100 · October 15, 2015, 2:57am

see here:

https://discussions.apple.com/message/23595291#23595291

Everyone that has a WD and using WD garbageware is getting forked.

your data corruption is irreverasable from all indications.

WD is sitting on its fanny about this issue

mikeyh · October 15, 2015, 2:57am

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.

jimsong · October 15, 2015, 2:57am

WD Drive manager even formatted my NON-WD hard drive. It’s a Drobo 5D with several TB of data. The volume also got renamed to MyBook and I saw the exposed EFI partition as well.

Scarfish · October 15, 2015, 2:57am

I’m in a world of hurt because of Mavericks. Too many issues to list, but let’s start with the issue of not even being able to MOUNT my MyBook Essential 2TB drive. Let’s start with that, and pray for Apple to start issuing some updates that fix some of the problems. I wouldn’t let WD off the hook completely, but I think it starts with Apple.

MacGuru100 · October 15, 2015, 2:57am

Anyone who uses HD control software is sticking their heads in the Lions mouth, period. The pros know this fact

All bundled HD software is garbage, period, no ifs, buts, exceptions.

Use disk utility to format your new HD

Use disk utility to control RAID on an array.

No, it starts with you learning what the pros have been preaching about HD for many years

“Never never use bundled (WD and Seagate are famous for the nonsense) software for read/writes to your hard drive, so let it be writen, so let it be done”

Why the hades people even THINK they need control software is disturbing.

WD needs to stick to making HD, stop peddling and giving out worthless HD software

Ali_red · October 15, 2015, 2:57am

I really like how WD doesn’t even clain any responsibility for data loss by forcing you to agree before upgrading to the new smartware, if you want my advise. sell the WD and buy an iosafe hdd. at least they give a **bleep** about data loss and don’t dodge away.