Apple released iOS 7.1.2 and Mavericks 10.9.4 a few hours ago. Once again, at least the iOS update appears to be untried and untested. There is also an update for Apple TV, 6.2, although I did not see anything new or different in the brief look I had after the update.
Those attempting to update iOS using iTunes might be out of luck as the update might get stuck after a while. The OTA update seems to work fine on a few devices that I tried.
When this first happened to one of my external backup drives, I was at a loss. The drive would not show up in Finder, but, I could see it in the “Disk Utility”. Attempting to repair the disk from Disk Utility, resulted in the message above.
Naturally, I Googled around and found that this was a very common issue and quite a few people had posted similar issues on Apple and other forums. Mostly people put it down to WD hard drives and some had even written to WD about the same.
After some experimenting, I found the solution to be surprisingly simple and pointed to yet another bug in Mavericks.
I tried this on different external drives of different capacities by simply pulling out the USB without ejecting the drive. Sure enough, I got the same issue and message after running disk utility on almost all occasions.
The solution, for me, was quite simple. Let the “Disk Utility” try and repair the drive and come up with the message shown above. Then remove the drive and plug it back in and it will work. Just run repair on it again to make sure that all is as expected.
Keep in mind that it might take around 2-10 minutes for the drive to show up in “Disk Utility” for the first time and it will not auto-mount and show up in Finder. Keep the “Disk Utility” running. After that, it’s simple. Run repair. Ignore the error. Re-plug the drive and run repair again.
I have tried this on 3 WD and 2 Seagate drives with HFS and ExFAT, all work. Hopefully it would work for some others who have similar issues.
Excepting for the MacPro, which has been in the works for quite some time, this was yet another “nothing” event from Apple.
Seems that all the presenters were in a hurry to get home. There was no interest and nothing captivating about the presentations. Apple has not only forgotten all about innovation and design, they also seemed to have forgotten all about captivating presentations and pride in their products. It was mechanical words all over again.
To be fair, can one actually blame just the presentations? In reality, there was nothing to present excepting “customers wanted this and we did that (since we could not think of anything more or better)”.
Take the MacBooks for instance. Intel has a better processor, nVidia has better graphics, etc etc. All these innovative companies made progress and Apple put these together in the same old box. That’s innovation for Apple!
Mavericks will be a free upgrade because it’s the worst OS X upgrade ever made. But, to make it look better, a nothing demo of Safari and iBooks was on. Oh, BTW, let no one find out the next great feature for the next OS X release…cut-n-paste. It’s a top secret and Apple has been working on it for years to make the technology available “for it’s customers”. In a few years from now, OS XX will have a brand new feature which will allow you to cut-n-paste files right from the finder…another few years later, that would be expanded to the ability to cut-n-paste directories, full of files, at one go!!!
Personally, I doubt if people at Apple actually use their own products anymore. If that was not the case, how come they never ran into all the issues that my colleagues and I ran into with Mavericks? Perhaps this article is true.
Now that Mavericks is on the AppStore, there is an interesting line on it…the iCloud keychain requires iOS 7.0.3, which is also just released. I guess no one at Apple realised that this feature needed a future version os iOS 7 at the earlier presentation of iOS 7 and Mavericks! The only logical reason for Mavericks to be a free upgrade would be to get the majority of OS X users onto a current version, which would make the overall ecosystem even more powerful. I doubt if the current release of Mavericks is going to cut it.
Also, more more stuff will roll out for free, since Apple already has more money than it can actually spend. Hold on…Apple can always offset the free stuff by making more “official” accessories in “gorgeous” colours and can start charging the original .mac and .me paying users. Yep, sounds like an excellent strategy since Apple cannot do more than to create “innovative” accessories anymore!
Interestingly, this is the first instance where Apple will be cannibalising the sales of the iPad Air with the iPad Mini since they have the same specifications (supposedly). I think they would have crippled the Mini in some way that we will find out about once people get their hand on both.
Once again, unless there are more updates/changes to the formal Maverick release, than the current GM, it would not be an advisable upgrade for any normal user. Even the techies would have issues with figuring out work-arounds. So, unless you have a default OS X installation with a single partition and do not have multiple user accounts, do not have a time capsule and do not use multiple networks, stay off Maverick till Apple fixes the critical issues. Also, for good measure, you local HDD access will also be a nightmare using Finder. The command line in Terminal will come to your rescue most of the time. Of course, the overall UI/UX remains the same from the good old *nix and Solaris days…nothing changes there!
More on the official Mavericks once I download and check it out…although, I have very little hope of any improvement in this “free” upgrade.
In an unprecedented move, Apple updated the GM build for developers yesterday. Not sure of what was fixed, all the issues I faced in the earlier GM build still remain. My advice for the normal OS X user remains the same. Do not upgrade when Mavericks is released, wait for feedback on the overall functionality and not go by Apple’s hype of new features and technology as you might land up with a practically un-usable system, depending on what you use. In short, if you are using a Time Capsule, or, use multiple users on the same system, or, use multiple networks, Mavericks, in it’s current build, would cause pain.
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