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I have a mid 2010 27" iMac. Until this evening it had an SSD (primary drive with OS X Mavericks installation on it) and a HDD as second drive. The HDD is a Western Digital I built into the iMac in 2012 after the Seagate HDD, which came preinstalled, was about to die.

I want to use the HDD in a external drive case. It is the recent Western Digital My Book Studio. For testing I attached the drive controller via my USB 3 cable from Leap Motion with my iMac and was surprised that OS X tells me, the media could not be read. S.M.A.R.T. state is completely OK.

I bought the drive case from ebay (without any drive) and tested the S-ATA controller to work correctly by formatting another HDD I had here with ExFAT and copying some films on it. A Asus Notebook with Windows 8.1 had no problems reading the drive. So I assume it is not the controller which is causing trouble. Or might the controller be configured to encrypt and decrypt and so cannot read the already unencrypted stuff?

Currently I am running Disk Drill scanning in depth for files to recover. It had different partitions (but I do not recall the partition table type):

  • HFS+ for Time Machine backups
  • HFS+ for ordinary file storage when using OS
  • NTFS for file storage (games) for Windows (which was installed through bootcamp on second partition on the SSD)

Currently I am running Disk Drill scanning in depth for files to recover. Disk Drill shows the drive is not formatted (but it is).

Yes, I know, I should have made backups, but one reason I was like "YOLO!" was that I took such precautions for the really important stuff which is stored somewhere else and another that I did not have any capacity left for that.

That is what is written in system.log when I connect the external drive to the Mac:

Oct 15 20:53:38 peter-imac kernel[0]: USBMSC Identifier (non-unique): 574341545241343535313739 0x1058 0x1144 0x1019, 2
Oct 15 20:53:38 peter-imac kernel[0]: IOSATDriver[0xffffff80369a1c00]::IdentifyDevice JMicron probe failed, trying with PassThrough16
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: IOSATDriver::Send_ATA_IDENTIFY failed 2 2
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: senseData: VALID_RESPONSE_CODE=112 (7=valid),
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          SEGMENT_NUMBER=0,
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          SENSE_KEY=2 (7 = FILEMARK, 6 = EOM, 5 = ILI, 3-0 = SENSE KEY)
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          INFORMATION_1,_2,_3,_4=0,0,0,0,
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          ADDITIONAL_SENSE_LENGTH=10,
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          COMMAND_SPECIFIC_INFORMATION_1,_2,_3,_4=0,0,0,0,
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          ADDITIONAL_SENSE_CODE=4,
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          ADDITIONAL_SENSE_CODE_QUALIFIER=1,
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          FIELD_REPLACEABLE_UNIT_CODE=0,
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          SKSV_SENSE_KEY_SPECIFIC_MSB=0 (7 = Sense Key Specific Valid bit, 6-0 Sense Key Specific MSB),
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          SENSE_KEY_SPECIFIC_MID=0,
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: :          SENSE_KEY_SPECIFIC_LSB=0
Oct 15 20:53:46 peter-imac kernel[0]: IOSATDriver[0xffffff80369a1c00]::IdentifyDevice SAT PassThrough16 failed, retrying with PassThrough12
Oct 15 20:53:47 peter-imac kernel[0]: SATSMARTDriver v0.9: enclosure 'Unknown 1058:1144', disk serial 'WD-WCATRA455179', revision '05.01D05', model 'WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0'
Oct 15 20:53:47 peter-imac kernel[0]: User client already open
Oct 15 20:53:47 peter-imac kernel[0]: Open failed
Oct 15 20:53:47 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: /dev/disk0
Oct 15 20:53:47 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: /dev/disk1
Oct 15 20:53:47 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: -99418112
Oct 15 20:53:47 peter-imac.fritz.box UserNotificationCenter[477]: ApplePersistence=NO
Oct 15 20:53:48 peter-imac.fritz.box com.apple.kextd[14]: Can't create kext cache under / - owner not root.
Oct 15 20:53:49 --- last message repeated 3 times ---
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: found disk: WD WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 Media, with size: 1000170586112, bsdname: disk2
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: S.M.A.R.T. data (id,curr,threshold,raw) model: WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0, firmware: 05.01D05
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 199   200 0   0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 197   200 0   0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 11    100 0   0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 9 92  0   5937
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 7 100 0   0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 5 200 140 0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 3 195 21  3250
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 1 200 51  0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 193   199 0   3085
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 200   200 0   0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 198   200 0   0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 12    98  0   2307
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 194   111 0   36
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 10    100 0   0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 192   198 0   2034
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 4 95  0   5116
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: 196   200 0   0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: Error determining system volume, trying file systems
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: Error opening file system in partition at offset 0
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: Using it as RAW
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: detect OEM volumes
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: Found filesystem raw, offset 0, size 1000170586112 
Oct 15 20:53:49 peter-imac.fritz.box Disk Drill[405]: Volume: /dev/disk2 (WD WDC WD1002FAEX-00Z3A0 Media) mounted: not mounted

Ignore the Can't create kext cache stuff, that is independent and written all the time.

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  • 3
    Does your iMac have a Fusion Drive?
    – Fyrefly
    Commented Oct 15, 2014 at 20:04
  • Nope.The SSD is still the original shipped preinstalled in my iMac from 2010 (Fusion Drives were not released back then) and the HDD is an ordinary Western Digital Caviar Black you can buy as sole part at many places.
    – p13n
    Commented Oct 16, 2014 at 6:11

1 Answer 1

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If I move the hard drive back into the iMac, everything is fine. The partitions are there accessible as before. It must have something to do with the controller of the external case. I guess the only option now is to:

  1. Copy the contents onto another storage.
  2. Build the HDD out of the iMac and into the external case.
  3. Format the HDD in the external case (just as the other mentioned above).
  4. Copy files from other storage onto newly formatted HDD.

The screwing never stops...

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  • Further information: The other HDD I used for testing (which I formatted while being build into external case) was not readable anymore when attaching it directly to the internal hard drive wiring of the iMac. Formatting it was required again. The Western Digital My Book Studio controller must do something with the drive access...
    – p13n
    Commented Oct 16, 2014 at 6:16

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