Apple Working on Fix for Western Digital Data Loss Disaster On OS X Mavericks

Western Digital is well known for making internal and external hard drives for your PC or Mac. A newly found bug in OS X Mavericks is wiping out data stored on some Western Digital external drives. Even though the occurrence rate of this happening is very low, Western Digital has confirmed that they are working with Apple to resolve the issue.

Western Digital is warning customers that if they had WD software on their Mac and then upgraded to Mavericks they can lose the data stored on their external drives.

Western Digital has confirmed to ComputerWorld, in most cases:

“Should this occur, the data on the product can likely be recovered with a third party software utility if the customer stops using the device immediately after the OS X Mavericks upgrade.”

Take this with a grain of salt because no third-party software can guarantee that your data can be recovered.

Western Digital says that the problem comes only when a very specific set of conditions are met.

“WD has been tracking this issue closely through our WD Forum and through our Technical Support hotline and the occurrence rate of this event has been very low. A specific set of conditions and timing sequences between the OS and the WD software utilities has to occur to cause this issue.”

WD is asking users to uninstall WD Drive Manager, WD Raid Manager, and/or WD SmartWare from their Macs before they upgrade to Mavericks. This precaution should be taken to try and avoid the potential problem of your data being erased after the update.

If you have already upgraded to Mavericks and are experiencing difficulty in accessing your external hard drive, please do not save anything to the drive, disconnect the drive from your computer, and contact Western Digital Customer Service at http://support.wdc.com/contact/, the company said.

Lou Desiderio, Synergy Communications President, also confirmed that WD is working directly with Apple to try and resolve the issue.

Whether you have or haven’t been affected by this bug, please ensure that you remove WD’s software and wait for a final fix to be issued.

Let us know if you have experienced this issue in the comment section below.