Mavericks and WD external drives

I checked through a list posted on the forum that listed locations of WD software ( I was sure I didn't have any installed as the drives were formatted before use as storage dtrives for iTunes ) and I don't sem to have any WD software installed on the internal drive in libraries etc either 'main or user'.
Do you think it's safe to install Mavericks and not have the drives wiped or corrupted as is noted in some threads ?

It was the WD drive manager that did the damage
That the WD Drive Manager can: re-initialized the drive and overwrite the partition table
(which is the premise of this thread)
working theory in test:
B (WD-ware) causing A (fsck command) when on platform C (Mavericks),
or A causing B on platform C
Known --    A fault B,   or B fault A   not occurring on platform D and E (ML and Lion)
WD-ware (B) is forcing A to perform false command,... there is no logical likelihood that a false A is causing B to fault the HD, (open to correction)
1. One or more aspects of WD-ware is/was (dependent upon version) Mavericks incompatible
2. Once resident in Mavericks, the WD-ware can/is possible of cross-populating this fault to any HD,....WD, Seagate or otherwise
3. Indications of fsck commands in conjunction with WD-ware ON Mavericks causing repartitioning / corruption.
4. fsck commands in conjunction with WD-ware ON Lion & Mountain Lion had no such occurrence.
ergo, (or A fault B) B fault A-as-C-resident = current issue
B fault A-as-D-or-E-resident = not possible
Resolution:    remove B on C-resident,
Avoidance:    format all new HD,   never install B
That the WD Drive Manager can: re-initialized the drive and overwrite the partition table
(which is the premise of this thread)

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Mavericks and unmounting external drive issues upon sleep

Greetings fellow Mavericks users,
I'm hoping someone here can provide some insight as to how to correct the issue I'm experiencing.
Little background:
I was using 10.6.8 for years on a 2008 Mac Pro. I saw no reason to update the OS until I recently acquired a USB 3.0 PCI card and an external drive. In order to use my new hardware, I had no choice but to upgrade to a new version of OSX. Rather than spend money, I took advantage of the free 10.9.2 upgrade available for my machine. The upgrade went surprisingly well with no major hiccups or problems encountered. Yes, a few apps and programs I had running prior to the upgrade were no longer compatible but in the grand scheme of things, my Mac Pro was still alive and kicking along with my most important programs and data. In fact, the upgrade to 10.9.2 fixed a sleep issue I had with 10.6.8 which required the use of an app called PleaseSleep. I don't need that app anymore as the machine goes to sleep and wakes up fine.
Now, on to my dilemma. Prior to the upgrade, I was using an external USB 2.0 drive to house media that I'd share between multiple network devices around the house via SMB (AFP stinks in this regard, hence my refusal to use it); i.e. BoxeeBox. I had run out of space on the USB2 drive hence the need to move everything to my new external USB3 drive that's connected to an internal USB3 PCI controller. The first problem I ran into was that Mavericks now uses Apple's own iteration of Samba (SMB2). After a bit of head scratching and research, I used an application called SMBUp as a replacement to Apple's SMB implementation. That's one problem solved. The next thing that I kept running into was that whenever the machine would sleep then wake up again, I'd get an annoying "Disk was not properly ejected" error message. After more head scratching and research, I've discovered that this appears to be a bug in OSX and how the OS interfaces with 3rd party USB controllers. Fine. I purchased a small app called Jettison which for all intents and purposes unmounts any external drives automatically before allowing the system to sleep. This is where my long-winded (apologies) description above starts to come into play. Now that I have the SMB issue figured out and am using Jettison to eject this USB3 drive when the machine sleeps, I've discovered that I'll still get the "Disk did not properly eject" error message despite Jettison IF there are users connected to the USB3 media drive. Is there a work around this where I can either get Jettison or Mavericks to kill the network connection to the share drive before it's unmounted prior to the machine sleeping?
TL:DR?
Using Jettison with Mavericks, I'm still getting "Disk did not eject properly" when waking the machine from sleep mode. Any way to fix this?
Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions provided.

I had the same problem with Time Machine and solved it by enabling "Enable Power Nap" in Energy Saver:
System Preferences...
Energy Saver
Restore Defaults
Check "Enable Power Nap: While sleeping, your Mac can back up using Time Machine and periodically check for new email, calendar, and other iCloud updates."
2013 21.5 iMac
OSX Mavericks
Seagate 1 TB slim USB 3.0 (power is drawn from USB port), formatted to Mac Journaling File System

Everything seems OK with Mavericks and WD external HD

I'm reading about tons of problems with Mavericks and WD external drives. Most mention WD software glitches.
I have a 2T WD My Book USB external HD. After upgrading to Mavericks (two weeks now), I haven't experienced and data loss at all, and all my partitions have retained their names and icons. They all check out OK in Disk Utility. I did have a Finder glitch once where I could not Copy/Paste any file over several several MB., (error 8057) but a restart fixed it. As far as know, that was only from one partition. I have had some video issues launching .avi and .mkv with an 'app not found' error. Making VLC the default for the those files in Get Info seems to have solved that (except the icons remain Quicktime). Previously when launching .avi files QuickTime did not launch and attempt to convert it.
For now, I'm regarding the video thing as a separate issue.
When I got my WD USB ext. a year ago, I did not install ANY WD software. I simply formatted to HFS+ and partitioned in Disk Utility and was good to go. Is it safe to say that since I don't have any of that pre-Mavericks software installed (I double checked with Spotlight), that my external drive is safe? Or should I run out and get a solid state drive ASAP? Is it also fairly safe to think that since I went through the upgrade unmolested and it's been two weeks now that everything is probably OK?

Yup, that's exactly what I meant. It comes preinstalled.
bluetortilla wrote:
It's my opinion that you should always format a new drive.
It's a good opinion!

Serious problems after Mavericks installation with External Drive Lacie P9220.

Experiencing serious problems after Mavericks installation with External Drive Lacie P9220 1TB. Mac Finder totally locked!
I had to format the External hard drive with a Windows PC (fat32), then format again with my IMac (mac Journal.) and hopefully restored data from time machine backup.
So far so good but system looks unstable. Some software were not able to write on the hard drive.Some strange things happens. With Mountain Lion never had an even minor issue.
I read many discussion regarding problems with WD, just wondering if anyone had the same problems with Lacie and if there is any tip to solve the
problem.
Many thanks.
Marco

Thanks very much for your reply.
Unfortunately I couldn't find a solution because the article refers to whom have configured the drive with included software and drivers that came with the drive.
This is not my case, I never used any third party soft ...only OS X disk utility ...
best
marco

I have an iMac and I am running out of disc space. I am considering an external drive to house my iTunes library. If I buy a second drive to operate as a back up will time machine back up the disc on the IMac and the external drive with the iTunes library

I have an iMac and I am running out of disc space. I am considering an external drive to house my iTunes library. If I buy a second drive to operate as a back up will time machine back up the disc on the IMac and the external drive with the iTunes library?

If you have a considerable photograph and/or movie collection you may want to consider off loading those to the EHD too. Here are Apple's article showing how handle iTunes & iPhoto libraries.
iTunes: library on EHD
iPhoto: How to move the Library to EHD
Roger

Can photos be transferred back and forth from/to iPhoto and an external drive? If so, how?

Can photos be transferred back and forth from/to iPhoto and an external drive? If so, how?

When in iPhoto for iOS you can share your photo to iTunes and then connect your iPad to your computer and use the file sharing window to move the photo to any connected hard disk. Sharing to iTunes is the only way to maintain original file size when sharing a photo in iPhoto for iOS.

HT4878 Why is this data chart Timeline multi colored (in About/Storage) and the external drive is only pink?

1. When viewing the Storage Timeline for my Macbook and the External Drive for the Time Machine backup instead of multi-colored bars the data is only showing a one pink one. Is that because it is all "backup" on the external? 2. Is the discrepancy in size the OS being left out? Thanks.

Time Machine makes full backups of the hard drive. If you want to change this, you can open System Preferences > Time Machine > Options, and add excluded items. However, I recommend you to keep backing up the whole drive, so you will be able to restore the whole backup in case of a hard disk failure

Can I use Mavericks on an external drive?

I need to keep 10.6.8 on my iMac to use AppleWorks, but I'd like some of the features of Mavericks denied me such as compatibility with OS7 on my iPad. Is it feasible to clone my hard disk to an external drive and upgrade that to Mavericks and switch to that for some operations? Thanks.

Jim
Thank you. What I'm concerned about is that others have found that if they put a bootable copy of their HD on an external drive and then upgrade it it becomes no longer bootable.
Could this happen? And if it did how could it be made once more bootable?
Maybe an article somewhere on this (?)

Maverick and my external burner

Since I got Maverick my Mercury external burner will not burn with Toast Titanium. It will read data from the drive and play DVDs in the drive, but I have to use the slow internal superdrive to burn from Toast.

The only way to revert back to Snow Leopard is with a Snow Leopard install disk, you cannot download the material, or by using a TimeMachine backup or other backup on an external disk. To revert you have to boot from the install disk, erase the hard drive, and install clean. You will loose all content when you do that unless you have a backup.
Although Lion, Mountain Lion and Mavericks specs say you need 2 GB ram, you actually need 4 GB or more. The Mac OS X now take about 1.5 GB just for itself. Leaving very little room for anything else to run.
Unless you can obtain and install more memory, the best thing at this time would be to make sure all processes (applications) you do not need are shutdown and not running in the background. Conserve the available memory as best you can.
If you are going to be overseas for an extended period, you might want to see if it is possible to buy some additional ram to install so the MacBook runs better.

Format and partition external drive if you want dual use Mac / PC

I had purchased from the Apple store in France a portable hard drive Iomega eGO USB 2.0/FireWire ov 250 Go capacity (P/N 31713900; Model: RPHD-C; S/N: FEAJ02011V)
Originally formatted HFS+, it would mount on any of my Mac desktops with Firewire, easily on the iMac using USB and with great difficulty on the iBook with the two USB plugs (together). It did not mount on any windows PC I had used for tests (so reformatting it FAT(32) or NTFS was *not an option).
I had reformatted it FAT32 using the iMac under mac OS 10.5 for use on multiple computers including Windows PC's. The drive would now accept to:
Mount on the iMac and iBook using Firewire
Mount on the iMac using USB, but it will NOT:
1 - Mount on the iBook using USB, nor
2 - Mount on any Windows PC using USB
The solution was found at the office with our IT helpdesk.
Whether I format it FAT 32 or NTFS (using the Paragon NTFS for mac OS X 10.5) on my iMac under OS 10.5, including when I do the same on another external drive than the Iomega, the PC would not recognise it while it would always mount on a Mac and it was even impossible on the PC to reformat it. The solution is (at least in windows world), you need to (1) format the drive, AND (2) partition the drive, even if this involves creating a single partition. Using Disk Utility of the Mac, I had only formatted the drive and not partitioned it into a single partition and Disk utility did not request that from me. The drive as prepared was perfectly usable on any Mac anyway.
The cure was to go back to the imac which had formatted it, mount it (it mounts), (1) reformat and (2) partition, using a single partition.
Then, the drive would instantly be recognised on the PC as a F drive, whether under FAT 32 or under NTFS.
The blame is in me and on the Apple Drive utility which did not help me (trust it would have been worse in windows world, but this is a bad mark on disk utility)
My suggestion to Apple would be that Disk Utilisty should tell us, once we have formatted a drive (HFS+, FAT 32 or NTFS using Parangon) that we are not done yet and still must create the partition(s), even if we only need one partition.
HTH

Hi Michel-Ange
You are talking to other user like yourself here and not Apple. If you wish to make a suggestion to Apple, I suggest you do it at this site - http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html
Allan

Can I back up the HDD and an External drive at the same time?

Hi -
I have a 250Gb HDD (tiny!), but I have just bought myself 2 x 2Gb external drives which I have now formatted.
I intend to move my complete iTunes library on to 1 of the externals and I want to use the other external as a back-up for both the HDD and the other external.
My question is: If I plug both the external drives via USB into my Mac (both then appear on my desktop - one named 'Media', the other named 'Time Machine', is it possible to use Time Machine to back-up not only the HDD, but the 'Media' external drive as well at the same time, or would this be a seperate exercise??
Thanks.

OK - upon backing up and seeing the results, I see that it has backed up both the HDD and the external, so i kind of answered the question myself...

TC and WD500 External drive - Locks up when copying large files

I have a TC with a Western Digital 500GB my Book connected to the USB port on the TC that I use for network Storage. Everything works fine until I try to copy large files or directories from the Finder mounted share. After the copy freezes the external drive can no longer be seen by airport utility. If I look at disks it sees the disk but no partition. I have to power cycle the external drive to have TC see the drive again. Then I disconnect the drive and plug it in directly to the MAC and run disk utility and his repairs the journal. I have to do the repair every time it locks up. Should the external drive be formatted different or does it have to be connected to a USB hub. Or is this just a bug with the TC and afp ?

I have this very same problem.
I tried to copy a 4GB+ folder from the Macbook to the 500GB MyBook attached to my TC and it froze.
Now the the files on the MyBook are invisible when attached to the TC ("0 Items") but are available when the drive is connected directly to the Macbook. I have run disk utility but it hasn't helped. The disk is FAT 32 formatted and the files on the MyBook are still invisible over the network.
When the drive attached to the Macbook directly I can see a 'phantom' file with the same title as the 4GB+ folder I'd tried to copy. This file is "ZERO KB" and it cannot be deleted (error code -43).
Anyone have a clue what is happening here?

Can I have iTunes music on my SSD and an external drive? How will this affect syncing to iOS devices?

I don't have space to keep my entire iTunes library on my SSD. Currently I have my iTunes library split as follows:
SSD: Contains a subset of music, apps, books, etc. New items usually get added here.
External HD: Contains all of my music and iTunes media (including apps... so many apps). It's usually missing the most recent items added, due to the fact I don't plug it in so often.
I ran into a problem maintaining these two libraries earlier while syncing my iPhone. When I tried to sync the iPhone with the SSD library, it would delete apps off of my phone because they weren't contained in the iTunes library there, even though I had the same base .itl file for both the SSD and the external libraries.
What I want to do is set it up so that I maintain a core of music on my SSD and the stuff I don't listen to as often on my external hard drive. I also want to keep all the space hogs (movies, apps, etc) on the external as well. However, I want this to appear as one seamless iTunes library and I DON'T EVER WANT ANYTHING DELETED FROM MY PHONE WHEN I SYNC IT. I want to be able to sync my phone without worrying that apps will be deleted and I'll have to restore them from iCloud and reset all the settings, sign in, etc. Right now I am backing up to iCloud, but my understanding is that iTunes will still delete things from my phone if they are not available in the library.
My question: How do I accomplish this? I have a lot of metadata in my iTunes library that I don't want to lose (playcounts, ratings, etc).
I currently have this:   SSD: .itl file pointing to music on the SSD, a mixture of iTunes media (some that I want easily accessible, some I don't)
                                  External drive: .itl file pointing to music on the external drive, all of my iTunes media (except for anything I may have added to the SSD)
I think I need this:       SSD: .itl file pointing to music on the SSD and the external, music that I listen to often
                                 External drive: music that I don't listen to often, things that take up a lot of space
My thought process is that I will need to somehow move music from the external to the SSD while maintaining the pointers so that iTunes knows where they are. For this I have unchecked "Keep iTunes Media Folder Organized" and "Copy Files to iTunes Media Folder When Adding To Library," and to maintain the pointers and move the songs, I'm thinking of using Doug's Applescripts for "Relocate Selected:" http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=relocateselected
Once I have the songs split across these drives, I'm going to copy the .itl file from the external to the SSD and boot it up to see if it works.
Two things: 1.) Will this approach work? Can I maintain my library across separate drives this way and have it be seamless? I understand I won't be able to access the media on my external hard drive when it is not plugged in (duh), but...
2.) Will it affect syncing? When my external isn't plugged in, will iTunes try and delete things from my iPhone? It should still be able to "see" them, it just won't be able to access them. Will I have to turn off syncing apps while syncing with my external device unplugged?
Thanks very much for any help and insight! It is greatly appreciated as I deal with limited storage space and an expanding iTunes library.

This is all just a partial answer since details will depend upon how you want to do it.
Post by Zevoneer: iPod media recovery options - https://discussions.apple.com/message/11624224 - this is an older post and many of the links are also for old posts, so bear this in mind when reading them.
Commercial software utility for transferring songs from i-device to Mac - http://www.fadingred.com/senuti/
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1848 - just media purchased from iTunes Store
You'll need to get it all onto one iTunes collection on your Mac Pro, then sync the devices to that. iTunes only lets you transfer purchases from a device, otherwise you have to use third party software.
I guess you could also look into getting iTunes Match.

Two computers with iTunes and one external drive

Hope someone has an idea.....I have internet at work, but not at home. I do have iTunes8 on both, but can not download or store my music library on the work computer. I have created a large music library on the home computer already and now need to get some missing album art and track info. How can I move the library to the external drive and then use the iTunes on my office computer to get the art and track info then take it back home?

You might find this article useful: iLounge - Managing your iTunes Library on an External Hard Drive

Copying to and from external drive causes Finder Freeze

I recently purchased a Shintaro USB HD dock to archive my many Gigs of Video footage.
I plug it all in and powered up without problems. Plugged a SATA disk into the dock it showed up (it was previously formated in an FW drive)
The drive showed up on the desktop and the files on it were there as well. When I try to either copy files to or from the dock the copy window comes up works for about 40% of whatever file I'm copying and then Freezes.
I've tried several disks and all do the same.
I cannot relaunch the finder, I cannot stop the process in Activity monitor, all I can do is power down, restart and try again.
I have tried using both a USB hub and hooked direct to the USB card in my PowerMac but the same thing happens everytime.
When I look at the external drive it has all the icons there but all the files are Zero Bytes.
Anybody got any ideas ?

Hi Brett,
Could be many things, we should start with this...
"Try Disk Utility
1. Insert the Mac OS X Tiger Install disc that came with your computer, then restart the computer while holding the C key.
2. When your computer finishes starting up from the disc, choose Disk Utility from the Installer menu. (In Mac OS X 10.4 or later, you must select your language first.)
Important: Do not click Continue in the first screen of the Installer. If you do, you must restart from the disc again to access Disk Utility.
3. Click the First Aid tab.
4. Select your Mac OS X volume.
5. Click Repair. Disk Utility checks and repairs the disk."
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
Then try a Safe Boot, (holding Shift key down at bootup), run Disk Utility in Applications>Utilities, then highlight your drive, click on Repair Permissions.
(Safe boot may stay on the gray radian for a long time, let it go, it's trying to repair the Hard Drive.)
Use Disk Utility to Repair the external drives.
While still in Safe Mode, move these files to the Desktop...
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.desktop.plist
/Users/YourUserName/Library/Preferences/com.apple.recentitems.plist
Reboot & test.

Mavericks and WD external drives

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