My external FireWire Disks Erased after upgrading to High Sierra!
Hi there!
I have a 27” iMac Late 2009 (i7 - 16GB RAM) with High Sierra installed and two External HD Western Digital FireWire (one is a My Passport 1TB and the other is a My Studio II 2TB in RAID 1 configuration).
I don’t know if it’s important, but yesterday I made an upgrade to my system with an SSD installed in the super drive SATA slot with a clean install of the High Sierra OS.
As soon I reconnected all my ext drives, everything runs fine. I also reinstalled the WD Raid control software and it looks like that everything was correctly managed.
I was working and was using my ext drives (in which I store my data files on the RAID 1 one) and nothing strange happened. I went to bed leaving the system on because it had to finish the upload on my dropbox and this morning I turned everything off without paying attention if something changed in my disk actually… but when I restarted the system, the OS asked me if I want to use the FireWire disk for the time machine!!!
I immediately figured out that something was messed up! Both drives were completely erased. The name of the disk was “My Studio” as when they come out from the factory.
I’m astonished, all my data files are gone. I have, of course, another back up of the raw files, but I lost all the working ones, the libraries, the completed jobs and so on.
This is a big, big, big problem for me!!
Anyone encountered this problem? Anyone has a suggestion on what can be happened. Because now, I did not trust the RAID 1 anymore!
Anyone has a suggestion on how I can recover my TOC data file (I hope the files are still there and only the table was erased).
Anyone else have this issue?
Update (12/16/2018)
Update:
I was been able to reproduce the problem.
I left one of my two firewire HD as “target practice” and I started to do several try.
I found that every time I restart the mac nothing happened, meanwhile, if I completely stop the mac, wait some minutes and restart the system 9/10 times, the drive come on erased and with an EFI partition also mounted on my desktop.
This drive me to think that with the OS installed on the new SSD, the system is loaded too fast and the firewire chain (for some reasons that I really don’t understand) don’t have the time to be mounted correctly and the EFI of the firewire HD does not give the information of the volume. Therefore, files are there, but there is no information that drives you there.
The problem is not occurring if I use USB connection.
Even if I will solve the matter using USB and crying for the loss of my library and catalogues (files are ok at 90%, but video, catalogue and library results all corrupted or recovered in a not correct or complete way), I think that it is a very disappointing behaviour of the WD firewires control (ok, you will say that they are old, but protect a fault that prvent from the lost of everything I think is a major requirement, isn’t it?)
Can be my supposition about the problem right (I mean if it sounds possible)?
Thank you all for your time!
Is this a good question?
her you did that "clean install" onto the SSD did you reformat the drive to APFS?
by mayer
Yes, the new SSD (in which I have the clean install) is APFS.
tks,
by Nello Rampini