WD needs to provide recovery assistance for Mavericks data loss

Now that the Western Digital / Mavericks data loss issue is well known it’s time for Western Digital to consider recovery assistance for everyone who has lost data.

I personally reported the loss of 10+ TB to Western Digital on 13th September while testing Mavericks Developer Preview 7 including a non WD drive.

Case : Power failure, SMC reset and restart caused all external drives to be initialised with a single My Book partition

Hi, there may be a really interesting defect somewhere in the WD Drive Manager / RAID Manager on MacOS which caused all external drives attached to my laptop to be reinitialised with a single MyBook partition (including a non WD drive) after a power failure and SMC reset. 

System: MacBookPro5,2 / MacOS X 10.9 (13A569) Mavericks Developer Preview 7 

Prior to the power failure my external drives were: 

  • My Book Studio II 6TB RAID 1 split into two time machine partitions Backup1 (disk3s2) + Backup2 (disk3s3) and an OSX boot partition (disk3s4) 
  • My Book Studio II 4TB RAID 1 with Archive partition (disk2s2) 
  • non WD 500GB with Old Backups partition (disk1s2) 

After a power failure, restart and SMC reset all 3 drives have been reinitialised with a single empty MyBook partition without any user interaction or confirmation. ie I now have 3 empty drives! 

The series of events was: 

logs

After the second power failure and SMC reset all the external drives become single MyBook partitions with visible EFI partitions. 

This is pretty bizarre as the only software installed which initialises as MyBook is the WD Drive Manager / RAID Manager. 

Any thoughts on what happened and any ideas on how to recover the data?

wouldnt hold your breath on it

all HD come with a bit of tiny paperwork that says “are not responsible … loss of data (‘period’)”

Don’t think that disclaimer applies to major software mistakes.

I’ve read as many of the data loss reports I could find in the Western Digital forums, Apple support forums, Macrumors forums, etc.

The recurring factors are:

  • 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

Ignoring my power cut and SMC reset… all of the well documented reports are identical to mine. Data loss occurs after a restart.

The worst affected seem to be MyBook Studio customers who are the most likely to have WD Drive Manager / RAID Manager installed.

I still have all of my Western Digital drives separated and have attempted manual recovery on 1 of the drives from a mirror set.

Now that this is a recurring documented issue experienced by many others my hope is that Western Digital and Apple will work together to isolate the cause and assist in data recovery for those affected.

2 Likes

That’s exactly what we’re trying to do, mikeyh. 

I have a WD My book studio II and WD RAID manager. I LOST ANY DATA after installing Maverick. I’m a photographer, What do I do? 

sergio1977 wrote:

I have a WD My book studio II and WD RAID manager. I LOST ANY DATA after installing Maverick. I’m a photographer, What do I do? 

Please check your private messages.

How do I contact WD for support?

http://support.wd.com/country/index.asp?lang=en