Western Digital Warns Mavericks Users of Data Loss
Hard drive manufacturer Western Digital is warning users of the company’s external hard drives that there may be conflicts between OS X 10.9 Mavericks and the bundled utilities WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager, and WD SmartWare. These conflicts could case data loss, and until more is known, Western Digital recommends that users of these applications delay upgrading to Mavericks or delete the applications and restart. Thanks to reader Charlie Colosky for the alert!
The RoaringApps software compatibility site lists WD Drive Manager as being incompatible with Mavericks, with one commenter claiming that Mavericks identified it as incompatible during the upgrade. The other Western Digital utilities either lack Mavericks-specific information or aren’t listed with RoaringApps.
[Update: 6 November 2013: Western Digital has sent out a followup email, saying that the problem is yet to be fixed, but affects only a small number of users. Western Digital urges customers running Mavericks to uninstall the Western Digital software (an uninstaller is available), reboot, and if there’s any difficulty accessing the drive, to
disconnect it and contact customer support. The company says that lost data can likely be recovered with a data recovery utility.]
When updating to Mavericks yesterday, my installation failed. I ran the repair utility, it said the hd was corrupted. I disconnected my external HD and scanner, then restarted. Ran repair and was successful this time. It has one minute left on install - fingers crossed. I have an iMac with a Western Digital HD.
This is a perfect example of why "Take Control of Upgrading to Mavericks" recommends verifying your disk BEFORE you start a major system upgrade.
I always delete them and do a full zero-out wipe of the new drive. I wish WD wouldn't add them, feels very Windows-like. An optional download would be better.
This is a much bigger problem. I've had both Seagate and WD drives silently trashed... 4 in the first 4 days after upgrading. No 3rd party drive software, no raid... all were in a PROBOX 4-bay USB dock.
No trashes in another manufacturer's dock, and nailing down the replication case has been frustrating... but I've managed to get silent file corruption doing finder copies of large files. SMART reports drives are 100% ok.
Apple definitely changed something that is screwing up certain USB drive adapters.
That's very concerning, but sounds like it might be a different problem yet. Have you talked with the manufacturer at all yet? Perhaps there are some bad controllers out there.
I use a Western Digital external hard drive without the bundled utilities and, of course, I had no problem upgrading to Mavericks, with no loss of data that I could detect.
Western Digital has a firmware update available for affected devices. See http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/wdsmartwareupdate/Step1.asp?id=wdfMB30_Essential&os=MAC