Well, I must say that this (for me at least) has been a shhhtstorm in a very small glass of water.
The fist things that struck me after I had recovered my data was
a) Why is WD so lousy to inform users about the “fix” (because I had to search, dig down on their website and then register a complaint here with them. The “hassle” was mainly having to register the complaint and wait for approval (whilen going crazy). Then all that remained was using the supplied software and wait for it to finish.
Had they just released a document/webpage which came up when using a search engine that said “relax, dont do anything this is simple to fix” they would have escaped a lot of unnessesary bad PR.
HEY, THIS IS STILL NOT ACCEPTABLE BUT IT’S NOT AS BAD AS EVERYONE THOUGHT…
b) This isn’t really a datacrash/loss/major malfunction per se, in that all the data was there (for me at last) and the entire filestructure was intact. It has simply been a “missunderstanding” between two pieces of hardware and nothing really awful happened.
The only files that became corrupt, was files I had “wiped” before trying to restore/search the right disc volume.
All in all, I am utterly impressed with the professinality that WD has handled this case (for me) and the speed they contacted me after I reported the problem. I have never in my entire LIFE been served this well from ANY tech company or manufacturer. But at the same time I’m FLABBERGASTED that they managed to handle the initial outcry so utterly terrible…
All in all, thank you WD. You are a very professional company and you did almost everything right.
PS : please make it easier for other people to find peace of mind when this thing hits them in the face and they start looking for a solution…
I upgraded to Mavericks 10.9 several months ago and continued using my MacBook Pro with the same external 2TB WD2002FAEX Drive setup that I had been using for quite some time without any problems.
Then suddenly a few days ago the drive appeared as a new empty drive that asked to be initialized.
I checked with Apple Disk Utility which showed only 1 partition when before there were 2 and said that 1 partition was empty.
I then upgraded to Mac OS 10.9.3 and nothing changed…all data still appears to be gone.
I never installed any WD software on the drive and formatted and partitioned with Apple Disk Utility.
I’m sorry, but this appears to not be an isolated phenomenon…nearly identical reports on many forums, Apple’s, MacRumors, etc. Different WD external drives vanishing after working well for some time with Mavericks.
Since this thread is posted as a sticky, can I ask whether the following line in the opening post still applies?
“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.”
As I posted in a thread on the portable drives forum, I have 4 My Passport Studio drives that I need WD Smartware to decrypt. I just upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mavericks thinking I would just need to download the latest Smartware firmware to access the drives. However, after reading that warning, I am afraid to try to access the drives, from fear of risking data loss. Have the issues that were causing some users to encounter problems 5 months ago when the November 6 update was posted been resolved?
Since this thread is posted as a sticky, can I ask whether the following line in the opening post still applies?
“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.”
As I posted in a thread on the portable drives forum, I have 4 My Passport Studio drives that I need WD Smartware to decrypt. I just upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mavericks thinking I would just need to download the latest Smartware firmware to access the drives. However, after reading that warning, I am afraid to try to access the drives, from fear of risking data loss. Have the issues that were causing some users to encounter problems 5 months ago when the November 6 update was posted been resolved?
You will need to uninstall SmartWare and reinstall the latest version of it. Also, if you have Drive Manager on your Mac, you will need to uninstall it as well.
Oh, and then you can plug in your Passport Studio drive.
I had trouble uninstalling SmartWare, as the instructions are not clear.
However, I seem to be able to access the data on one of the drives regardless (haven’t tried the other ones).
Here’s what happened:
Bear in mind that I had previously upgraded to Mavericks.
So starting from that position, to uninstall WD Smartware, I first went to the Applications folder and tried to run the Uninstall WD SmartWare application. The app opened and asked, Do you want to uninstall WD SmartWare? I answered affirmatively, after which an error message appeared: “The application has encountered an unexpected error and is now exiting.” I was not sure what to make of that. I didn’t see SmartWare listed in the apps folder, though. I did see a WD Drive Utilities app and a WD Security app listed (as before). I rebooted the computer.
I tried attaching the My Passport Studio drive to the computer, but instead of a window requesting the password to unlock the drive, which is what ordinarily would happen, instead I got a message saying the drive could not be read by the computer, ignore? vs eject?
I then downloaded the WD SmartWare Update for Mac version 3.1.0.14 file from the WD Support Downloads page, and installed it.
It spent several minutes classifying data on my computer (Passport Studio drive not attached to the computer yet).
When SmartWare finished the analysis of the files on the computer, I attached the drive and the unlock window appeared. I was able to access the files on the drive.
(I really, really hate that SmartWare categorizes data on my computer. I don’t need that function - I use Apple’s TimeMachine for scheduled backups. All I need the WD external drives to do is store data I save on them in an encrypted format. If there were a way to do that on the drives I have without needing to use SmartWare, I’d get rid of SmartWare completely.)
If I buy now a drive, do not use the Smartware: are there any realistic chances of losing data?
And: what’t the use of using this Smartware. What are the advantages?
Yosemite public beta is not 100% compatible. WD Drive Manager unexpectedly quits if you delete or change the RAID mode on an external disk.
I recommend uninstall WD Drive Manager to avoid other problems, until WD releases a update.
Can you please share on the steps on how did you recover your lost data as I am having similar issue with one of my WD 3 TB HDDs unaccessible currently after months of looking for a workable solution? Thanks
WD Drive Manager is NOT 100% compatible with Yosemite - unexpectedly quits if you delete or change the RAID mode on an external disk.
I recommend uninstall WD Drive Manager to avoid other problems, and until WD releases a update.
if you need to erase the My Book Studio II using Disk Utility app in OSX.
I’m a television travel journalist. I had all (I mean ALLLL) my footage backed up on My Passport Ultra. When I tried to access the data yesterday on all of the computer in the office, it’s not working.
The drive manager can see that there is a disk connected but the files are unreadable!
The support website of WD is not working (500 network error, files not available). There is no phone support.
What can I do?!
I had to go on air today saying that I wasn’t able to produce a story because of my (not) amazing external drive.
Does anyone know anything yet? My 3TB passport External just stopped working all of a sudden with a message that the “kernel extension is not from an identified developer” which singled out the WDUSBHPDriver.kext file. My laptop is too old to run Yosemite, so there’ s no chance of having a problem due to updating to a new OS. I uninstalled and reinstalled all WD software that was available, but no dice. I even tried restarting, zapping the PRAM, and plugging it back in again, only to get teh same message. This thread indicates that such problems have been going on for over a year now (hich would have been nice to know before buying) and does anyone have an answer yet?
On the other hand, if the drive is well and truly messed up (though I suspect it’s more the USB controller than the drive), what harm would there be in taking it out of the case and attaching it directly to my hardware via some other means? It’s not like breaking the warranty means anything when you count the cost of the drive versus the value of the data on it that may otherwise be lost!
Have you tried pulling the WDUSBHPDriver.kext file. When I got a Mac Passport external earlier this year I read about all the problems the WD software had caused people upgrading to Mavericks so I just ignored all the WD software and ran the drive as it came. No problems. I’d suggest pulling all the WD software from your computer, including the WDUSBHPDriver.kext file and rebooting. It doesn’t sound like you have anything to lose doing that.
Also, try it on another computer without any WD software and see what happens. If that doesn’t work, then taking the drive out of the case sounds like a reasonable last resort.
Yes, I tried those things. I even took it to another Mac that had never had an external HD connected and tried it there. Oddly, they were running Win7 in Parallels at the time, and Windows recognized the drive immediately, even though the Mac could not mount it for access. I also set up my Ubuntu workstation to mount HFS drives, but it would not see the drive, either. Since I’m questioning whether it’s a .kext or a USB issue, I still lean toward removing the drive from the case and giving it a go with someone else’s USB hardware, or possibly bypassing USB altogether and seeing if it will mount as a SATA device. That’s a bit harder to do with a Mac, though, so I’m still hunting for a better alternative, like a newer .kext. Thanks.
This is the fix I used. I went into TERMINAL with the unrecognizable external disk connected. Diskutil repairvolume /dev/disk2s2. That failed. Then, diskutil reformat /dev/disk2s2. Success, then diskutil verifydisk /dev/disk2. Now it shows mounted and it’s back on my screen. May the force be with you!
I have a My passport for Mac. I can not access my data. I keep trying but a couple of times only the folder appeared bu no files. Now nothing appears. Can Anybody help.
I see there are some solutions above, read the whole thread first.
If nothing seems to work for you, since it’s 2015 and Yosemite has been out long enough, then contact support contact WD directly and demand that they help you, or at least clarify the situation about WD drives and Yosemite.
