External Drive Reformatted Itself

I have an external drive that used to be a 3TB USB 2.0 WD MyBook. A while ago I upgraded my MBP to a 2012 model that has USB 3 so I bough an USB 3 external drive case, took apart the MyBook and swapped the drive to the new case. It worked flawlessly for months. About a week ago I updated OS X to Mavericks and I tried and used the 3TB drive for the first time with Mavericks today. I plugged it in, it mounted for a second with the correct volume name "Goliath". Then after about a second or two it disappeared - unmounted itself, presumably - and then it mounted itself again after another two seconds as a blank 3TB volume named "MyBook" and that's it. My 2,5TB of data are gone....or so it seems. I tried to restart the drive, the computer, PRAM reset, nothing worked....any suggestions? Not sure if the issue is Mavericks-related, but it's suspicious at least.
I found only this in the Console, but it does not tell me anything...:
2013-11-06 21:37:18.871 HazelHelper[290] Received unmount notification from unknown filesystem at /Volumes/Goliath.
2013-11-06 21:38:52.428 HazelHelper[290] Deregistering...
2013-11-06 21:38:52.429 HazelHelper[290] Done

Western Digital said that their apps have got a bug that causes the lose of data from their external drives in Mavericks, so you are one of the affected users.
Now, the only thing you can do is to try to use file recovery services or applications, but they might be expensive and it's possible that they don't work.
Before upgrading Mac OS X, always check that there won't be any compatibility issue, because things like this may happen. At the moment, what you can do is to uninstall the Western Digital applications

Similar Messages

External Drive Reformatting - Journaled

Hi all.
For about the past 3 months, I've been backing up my MacBook via Time Machine to a 1 TB external over USB2. Nice and easy.
With Apple recently updating their AEBS software, I decided to connect said 1 TB external to my AEBS and see if wireless backups were possible (as I personally had some doubts as to the reality of that scenario). Now with my external connected to my AEBS, I am constantly receiving the following error message when my scheduled TM sessions run:
+*Time Machine Error*. The backup volume in not in MacOS Extended (Journaled) format, which is required.+
*So my question(s) to the forum...*
Can I transfer my backup data from my 1 TB external to another drive, reformat the 1 TB external as Journaled, then move my backup data back to the newly Journaled 1 TB external so that Time Machine recognize the backup files (aka: continue backing up where it last left off - all previous backups intact)?
Or will I have to start all over again with an initial (and new) Time Machine backup, loosing all previous TIme Machine backups?
Thanks.

Scott Robinette wrote:
Thanks V.K.
I too thought it was formatted Journaled (not sure why i would have formatted it any other way) and will have to investigate this eve as I'm away from my MacBook at the moment.
And Interesting to learn that wireless & wired backups are stored differently. Despite the message about reformatting, maybe attempting to backup wirelessly to a drive containing backup files that were generated via USB2 is causing some sort of hiccup?
it shouldn't. i really don't know what the problem is. it might be that there is a problem with the file system of some sort. plug in the drive directly and repair it (repair disk not permissions) with disk utility. see if it reports any errors. in any case, reformat should fix fix all such issues.
Again, more investigative work to follow.
Thanks.

HT201250 Will using Time Machine on my external drive, reformat or wipe my external drive?

I need to backup my whole computer, and was wondering if I can do this with Time Machine using my external hardrive. The problem is, that I am using this same external hardrive for other things and I don't want to lose that data. Will using Time Machine wipe my external hardrive? Apple did not make it so clear in their guide on using Time Machine, but I have a feeling that it must reformat the hardrive. If my hunch is correct, is their any other way I can backup my computer using an external hardrive without having to wipe it? I was thinking about just dragging Macintosh HD into a folder on my hardrive and letting the file transfer. What are the downsides of doing this?
NOTE: Don't know if this makes a big difference, but I am running OS X 10.8.3

If the drive is not formatted correctly for Time Machine, then it will have to format it. But, it won't do that automatically. It will ask if you want to use that disk for Time Machine when you attach it.
You can have Time Machine on a drive with other data. See Pondini's Time Machine FAQ: http://pondini.org/TM/3.html

HP HD3200 2tb external hdd reformatting itself

I bought the HP HD3200 2tb external hdd just about a year ago and it has worked famously until very recently. Starting about a week ago the drive would randomly stop being read by my computer and after going into disk management the space on the drive has somehow transformed into unallocated. The only option I have at that point is to reformat the drive and start over. On top of that if I reformat the drive I then have to run a test disk to adjust the aprtition table otherwise it becomes formatted but simply does not show up in the browser. This has happened 3 times now and I would like to find a permanent solution before I lose something I can't replace. Any thoughts on why this has started to happen or how i might fix it would be greatly appreciated.

Take the drive to a Windows PC and install Data Rescue ($100) and let it work on reading the 1's and 0's of the files themselves, outputing the recovered files to another large external hard drive (formatted exFaT on the PC, not on the Mac and not NTFS!)
This is going to take hours to complete, so buy the software upfront and get it over with.
Once it's finished you can hook up the drive to the Mac and it will read it, no NTFS reading/writing software required.
If the PC your using is a Windows XP machine and there is no exFAT, then install the free exFAT for XP from Microsoft first.
Take a second to learn about drives and formatting, it's not wise to use NTFS software as you see now the problem.
Drives, partitions, formatting w/Mac's + PC's

Time Machine - NTFS formatted external drive - reformat? If yes, how?

I have a USB external hard drive which is NTFS formatted. It shows up on my mac but Time Machine does not show it when I try to "Choose Backup Disc".
I suspect that the NTFS format is a problem. If so, how do I reformat this disc so it will work with Time Machine?

You are correct. You can read, but not write to an NTFS formated drive.
You can use Disk Utility to reformat the drive (and partition it if you like). Disk Utility is located in the Utilities folder, which is inside the Applications folder.
In Disk Utility, on the left side, select the external disk. Then select the Erase Tab. Give the disk a name and choose "Mac OS Exteneded (journaled)". I also recommend you take the extra step of zeroing out the drive by clicking on the "Security Options" button, and then choosing the second option down.
now you should be ready to go.
After you reformat the drive, you can partition it.
I have one partition for Time Machine, and one for me to save other files.
The Time Machine partition should be equal to or greater than the drive (or drives) it is backing up.
hope this helps

Time Machine doing full backup of external drive again

I have a Time Capsule, as well as an external data drive connected to my Mac. The external drive (named Yoda) is NOT excluded from backups. Yoda has about 703 GB of data on it.
I recently replaced the hard drive inside my time capsule. Consequently, a full backup was made, which was to be expected.
When the new full first backup was done, I disconnected the Yoda drive. A day later, I reconnected it, and now Time Machine is saying it's doing a 703 GB backup. Since the size TM indicates its backing up is ever so slightly larger than the total amount of data on Yoda, I'm assuming it's doing a full backup of the Yoda drive for some reason (the only other drive, the system drive, only has about 200 GB on it).
The files on Yoda weren't changed, certainly not all 703 GB of them. No hardware changes were made, no updates, tinkering, modifications, or anything. The Mac itself has not even been shut down or logged out. The ONLY thing that's happened was the Yoda drive was unmounted and disconnected, then several hours later it was reconnected.
Why is Time Machine repeating a full backup of this external drive? Is this going to happen every time I disconnect and reconnect the drive? Is there any way to make this not happen, short of excluding the drive (which I don't want to do)?

After posting this thread, I did find a similar thread (in the "More Like This" section) and saw your responses in it. You had suggested the same thing, as well as doing #A5 if that didn't work.
I tried #A4 and although that seemed to work in the other thread, unfortunately it didn't work for me. So I moved on to #A5, but I could not get my Time Capsule drive to show up in the Disk Utility. I didn't see a "data folder", but I did try directly dragging the sparsebundle to the left pane of the Disk Utility, but that seemed to hang Disk Utility.
At this point I'm probably going to try deleting the plist file as per #A4, erasing (reformatting) the drive, rebooting, and starting a whole new backup from scratch. It's not going to take much longer than backing up the entire external drive by itself would have, and I still have older backups (up to a few days ago) on the original Time Capsule drive in case of massive disaster.
So we'll see how that goes...

External Drive UNMOUNTING On Its Own...

Hello.
I have a quite-brand new Iomega External Drive FireWire 800 2TB, bought recently to replace my old failed drive, to be a Time Machine Drive for my iMac.
For the past few days I have observed something very very strange: This TM Drive will for no reason, unmount itself from the Desktop; Sometimes I will be at the computer and that usual warning window message about not unmounting your external drive properly will appear. But sometimes when I get back to my iMac, the ext drive has already unmounted, not sure for how long since the icon is not there anymore.
I just have to turn off and on the drive again to get it mounted.
Before this strange thing, there was a couple of times when TM failed to back up, but it was nothing serious, I just back up again and it is fine. There was once prior to this, that I re-format the drive again (GUID partition) and TM all over again.
I ran Disk Utilities and it says the drive is OK and need no repairs.
So what went wrong here? I have doubts that the drive is faulty because I just got it recently as a new replacement to a previous dead drive. Could it be the iMac itself? The OS? Or the physical FW800 port itself?
Need some advice and help, thanks and cheers

Over the last few days, I have noticed this behaviour (external drive unmounting itself), but I have a 2TB Western Digital USB2 My Book Mac Edition drive that has been working fine with Apple's Backup program since I bought the drive exactly one month ago. The Backup files have now half-filled the drive, and when Backup is attempting to save a new file the drive unmounts and the backup fails. Hers is the backup log from Console for the last couple of days (Cassini is the name of the WD external drive):
2010-11-18 11:54:05.080 Backup[22672:8537] debug: unable to test mount disk image {
"image-components" = (
"/Volumes/Cassini/Backups/Phobos - 2010.11.18-00.30.22.847.backXX/Contents/Contents/Backup.sparseimage"
"shadow-file" = "(null)";
"system-entities" = "(null)";
2010-11-18 11:54:05.107 Backup[22672:8b03] unable to gzip /Volumes/Cassini/Backups/Phobos - 2010.11.18-00.30.22.847.backXX/Contents/backup.log: file does not exist
2010-11-19 08:42:53.803 Backup[22672:bb9f] debug: unable to rename disk image {
"image-components" = (
"/Volumes/Cassini/Backups/Phobos - 2010.11.19-07.36.08.399.backXX/Contents/Contents/311805478.972355.sparseimage"
"shadow-file" = "(null)";
"system-entities" = "(null)";
2010-11-19 08:42:53.848 Backup[22672:9e3f] unable to gzip /Volumes/Cassini/Backups/Phobos - 2010.11.19-07.36.08.399.backXX/Contents/backup.log: file does not exist

Spotlight erased external drive?

I have a Western Digital 320 gb Personal Edition external drive connected through USB. Today I started Time Machine for the first time. I noticed as TM was backing up my files from one internal drive to another that Spotlight was indexing my external drive. Didn't think anything of it, indexing is usually a good thing.
Checked the WD drive post TM initiation, and it's empty, by the looks of the gigabytes available, wiped clean.
Questions: How can this happen? Are the files truly gone, or by some trick they'll reappear? I won't restart my computer until I hear a somewhat definitive answer, and potential solution. Thanks!

OK, having not turning off the Western Digital 320 gig drive since beginning this, my Command-I reveals though it is a 320 gig drive and shows there are 0 files, two things to note:
1. It is now formatted as a MS-DOS (FAT 32) drive instead of the original Mac initialized disk.
2. Though the capacity is 320 gb, there is only 120 gb. available, meaning the Mac files/.jpgs/mp3 apparently still exist on the drive, but are now rendered invisible?
Great - invisible files.
SO: Can simply indexing an external drive reformat it to MS-DOS Fat 32?
If so, how do I access the existing files? They do not appear erased.
PROCESS:
1. I plugged in a Mac-formatted external Western Digital drive using USB with 200gb of information on it,
2. started Time Machine to back up to a secondary internal drive,
3. simultaneously and automatically the external drive began to be indexed while starting up Time machine, and
4. now post-indexing it shows 0 files available - how can this happen, how does indexing reformat a Mac-initialized drive into a MS-DOS (FAT-32) drive while still retaining the existing files on the drive?? I am dumbfounded.

External Hard Drive Formats Itself?

System: Mac Mini 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, OS X 10.6.8
This machine is my home file server. One external drive, LaCie case with Seagate HD, appers to have spontaneously reformatted itself. I worked on the computer via screen sharing, started a file download to a drive named Media_03. Came back to the machine a half hour later, and Media_03 wasn't mounted. Opened disk utility to see what had happened, and found this:
The drive that had been Media_03, formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and containing 1.6 TB of files, was now disk8s1, empty and formatted as FAT32. No one else had been on the computer. No one else had even had access to the computer. In 30+ years of working with computers, I've never seen anything like this.
Anyone have any idea what might have happened here?

Hello Jennsy:
Welcome to Apple discussions.
Try this:
Turn your external disk off. Trash a preference file (com.apple.timemachine.plist) and restart. Turn the external disk on. If the external disk is not recognized as a TM disk, go to system preference>time machine>select disk.
Barry
P.S. I do not have a WD disk, but I have read other posts in these forums about people that have had problems with them (FWIW).

HT1369 Ipod touch not being recognized by itunes (but is registering as an external drive by the computer itself) have updated and reinstalled itunes, stopped/started apple mobile device and removed and mobile programs associated with my non apple cellpho

Ipod touch not being recognized by itunes (but is registering as an external drive by the computer itself) have updated and reinstalled itunes, stopped/started apple mobile device and removed any mobile programs associated with my non apple cellphone. This seems to have started happening after the last Itunes update I did as I was able to put music on my ipod touch a month or so ago. Is there some way to go back to an older version of itunes? I really have no idea what else to do since I followed every step on the trouble shooting page for windows 8.

I had this problem too and my roommate solved it!
Go to 'Settings'
'Music'
Scroll to the bottom and enter your password to log onto your home sharing
Then connect to iTunes and sync!

How to reformat an external drive?

I have a 1 TB Lacie external drive. it was originally formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted). It also might have been formatted as a bootable drive, but I am not certain. Today I mounted the drive, entered the decrypt key and want to re-format the drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I am using Disk Utility to do this. When I click on Erase within Disk Utility, I get this error:
I am using Mac OS X Mavericks. Anyone know how to fix this so that I can re-format the drive?

Still struggling to solve this. I tried booting from another external drive as suggested, but once booted I still could not reformat the Lacie drive. Same error.
I also tried the following Terminal command: diskutil erasevolume HFS+ UntitledHFS /Volumes/Lacie But I get this error in Terminal:
Who would have thought that simply re-formatting an external drive could be so hard? Any other ideas?

Reformat external drive from mac os to windows

the windows partition on my mac book pro is close to full.
i would like to use an external drive formatted for windows for my growing number of pc games (gw,tdu,fsx,dirt - which run great on the mac book pro windows partition btw).
i tried to reformat a mac formatted external drive using disc utility, erase, format volume, but only choices were mac os extended and unix - no fat32, dos, or windows choices.
if i start up my mac book pro using windows, the drive does not show up in the 'hard drives' section of 'my computer'
please let me know how to reformat this mac formatted external drive so i can use it when the mac book pro is running windows.
thanks

Hi Stefan, Turns out my old ext hd was corrupt. Bought a new 300G G-Drive and got a brand new problem which you may have heard of - the dreaded hal.dll crash. My windows partition crashed and after much effort I finally have everything working.
Had to go to the mac store to get a boot camp 1.4 disk (mine was the original) was able to save files from the corrupt windows partition to my mac partition. next i used boot camp to revert to a single partition on my internal drive, saving my mac system and files. next used boot camp to partition the internal drive into big mac and 31G windows. reinstalled windows. next using disk utility i split my 300G external into 10 30G partitions using your GUID suggestion and formatting in ms-dos(fat32) so my mac could read/write to it. dragged the files i saved to the 30G partitions and they work fine. loaded more games into the 30G partitions and they also are working fine.
could not have done it without your pointing out the GUID option.
vielen dank, john

Reformatting external drive to Mac OS Extended but maintaining RAID setup

Hi again,
I am considering taking the leap finance-wise and purchasing [this external drive|http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-WDH2Q20000N-Studio-Interface/dp/B00 16P7H3Q/ref=cmcr_pr_producttop]. It comes pre-formatted to HFS+ or something, so I guess I will need to reformat it to Mac OS Extended to use it with FCE.
So here are the questions:
*1. Would it make more sense to use it in RAID 0 mode for faster speed, or RAID 1 mode to keep a safer backup of my files?*
*2. Would reformatting it to Mac OS Extended for use with FCE still allow it to use normal RAID abilities?*
I realize this is not the right forum for posting this, but I thought someone here might be knowledgable about backup in general and how to best format an external drive for use with FCE, while maintaining the ability to have a "mirrored" RAID setup. Any thoughts?
Thanks in advance,
Sasha
Message was edited by: skalicki`

So just one more question because I'm pretty new to this whole RAID thing:
Say I formatted the drive to RAID 1 so in theory I have 1TB of space that is "mirrored" over to the other external drive.
*When I ingest my footage, will copies be stored to both drives, so if one fails, I will still have my media?*
I gathered this was the idea but didn't know how it works with FCE.

External drives will not reformat to Mac OS Extended

I just moved several external drives from a PC to a Mac permanently and want to reformat them to Mac OS Extended. However, when I attempt to do it, I receive an error message saying that the formatting was unsuccessful after the disk is already erased. I am able to reformat them to DOS on the mac and the drives do work for some functions, but I need them formatted to Mac OS Extended in order to back them up with Time Machine.
The drives are fairly new; one is a Western Digital "My Book" 1TB only a few months old; the other two are LaCie "Big" 650 GB drives about two years old. They work fine, except for this one problem.
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

You need to do the following:
Extended Hard Drive Preparation
1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder. If you need to reformat your startup volume, then you must boot from your OS X Installer Disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger or Leopard.)
2. After DU loads select your hard drive (this is the entry with the mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of the drive in DU's status area. If it does not say "Verified" then the drive is failing or has failed and will need replacing. SMART info will not be reported on external drives. Otherwise, click on the Partition tab in the DU main window.
3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to GUID (for Intel Macs) or APM (for PPC Macs) then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and wait until the process has completed.
4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main window.
5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to return to the Erase window.
6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several hours depending upon the drive size.

How do I reformat my external drive for Time Machine?

I think I might have messed up My Passport (external hard drive) when I disconnected my iMac to take it to the Apple Store to have the screen repaired (was replaced). I turned Time Machine off before I disconnected the external hard drive but didn't eject it. I reconnected everything Monday morning and it was backing up fine until this afternoon but suddenly stopped and gave me warning messages about it not being able to back up. The message directed me to Repair Disk which I tried but that didn't work. and I was "told" to reformat the drive. But when I reconnect it to my mac, the mac doesn't recognize that its there. I don't know if its worth trying to fix, or if I should just get a new one. (I have an on line back up service so all my data is safe and backed up elsewhere). I've only had the drive for maybe 6 mts, or a little longer and I know it was far from full. I have Time Machine turned off now and the drive disconnected . Is it worth repairing. If there is something wrong with it a new one might make more sense. I hope I have explained this okay. Thanks for any suggestions. It is a Western Digital external drive.
laverne's mom

WD drives are not all that reliable according to some reports going around.
And BUS powered drives are not good choices for backups if it's drawing too much current, Apple can cut if off in a update, use self powered drives instead.
You can use the drive, but as a transport drive, not as a vital backup.
TM drive isn't quite as good as a backup as it could be, and online storage is slow to upload and can be compromised or lost (it's happened before) so you should diversify more with clones and storage drives in addition to TM drives.
Read my backup, bootable clones, troubleshooting, performance, wifi security and restore info/advice here
https://discussions.apple.com/message/16276201#16276201

External Drive Reformatted Itself

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