“Attach a Supported Drive” Message in WD Software

Hi all,

I would like to share with you a solution that I found to an issue I had with WD Discovery, WD Drive Utilties, and WD Security not detecting any of my WD drives (My Book, My Passport—I own 4!). The WD software would display the message “Attach a Supported Drive” even though I was running the latest WD software. And macOS could see the drive just fine.

Below is a copy/paste of part of an email that I had sent to WD support. One of their reps suggested that I share this solution with your community in case others have the same problem.

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I had already tried uninstalling ALL versions (new and old) of WD software and then reinstalling them. I even went into the preferences folders on both my system and user sides of the macOS, and I deleted everything that said “WD” in it (of course I studied it carefully prior to deletion). And I restarted before performing clean installations of all WD software. Unfortunately that did not resolve the issue; however I have some good news for you tonight that you may wish to report to your escalations team: I found the problem and the solution!

Please see below for what I did. I shall attach photos to assist you in understanding my procedures.

  1. First I clicked on the Apple logo on the upper left hand corner and then went into About This Mac .
  2. Then I clicked on System Report .
  3. On the left side under Software I clicked on Extensions .
  4. I then looked for anything that said WD in the name…I found two! They were WD1394_64_109HPDriver.kext and WDUSB_64_109HPDriver.kext . Both drivers indicated that they were from Western Digital . And the drivers were both created and modified on September 7, 2013 at 1:17pm . These are some very OLD drivers indeed!
  5. So I went into the Extensions folder via this procedure: Open Finder then click on Go at the top menu, and after that click on Go to Folder… (or Command + Shift + G for shortkey). Then type System/Library/Extensions/ and click Go .
  6. I then moved WD1394_64_109HPDriver.kext and WDUSB_64_109HPDriver.kext into the Trash.
  7. I restarted my Mac.
  8. Sure enough, after restart your WD software recognized my WD Passport for Mac Ultra drive!

Conclusion : Old outdated drivers which are known as kernel extensions (kexts) on the Mac were preventing your WD software (Discovery, Utilities, and Security) from detecting my WD drive.

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I hope this helps someone out! I’ve attached screenshots too.

\m/ Mage \m/

Just FYI, the utilities do not work with drives using Thunderbolt connections (and I do not have any old kext issues). Connect with an old-fashioned USB port to make any changes to RAID configs or to get WD Discovery to even run. It will not if is does not see a supported drive on USB. WD does not seem to have any interest in supporting Thunderbolt on Mac.