I’m not sure if this is an issue with the new enclosure I bought for this drive or the drive itself. Both are brand new. The enclosure is from Simplecom.
I’ve also tried putting the RED drive into a PC tower with a spare SATA slot and still not recognised in Disk Management software (via Control Panel app).
Using USB on macOS I’ve tried using Disk Utility and Disk Warrior and neither see it. The drive spins up for a second or two five times then gives up. The suggestions from WD support were to try with a SATA connector (failed) or on Mac using this troubleshooting page (pretty useless because the instructions assume the disk is recognised by Disk Utility app which it isn’t).
The other links were equally useless:
To know more, please refer to the links below:
“Installing a WD SATA, SAS, or PATA drive in an external USB/NAS enclosure or Personal Video Recorder”:
“How to determine if a WD hard drive is compatible with a computer system or motherboard” :
Ok but I already have a WD support person who advised me to use a PC
program with the drive connected over IDE. I don’t have access to a PC,
though I did last week and we couldn’t detect the drive using any of the
standard windows software. I’ve also tried with Disk Utility and Disk
Warrior on macOS but in the ext HDD case I have it doesn’t seem to be even
talking over USB.
Is there a possibility to just exchange it with a similar sized and
reliable drive already enclosed in a WD case? Then you can look at the
drive and determine why the 4 computers I’ve tried can’ see it. I didn’t
expect so much trouble from WD drives, I’ve bought WD 2.5" HDD online
before and mounted in a RAID enclosure and they just worked.
Hi, I have been having a similar problem today with a brand new drive (1/30/18). I have a Mac and just upgraded to High Sierra 10.13.3. The brand new blank 4TB My Passport drive is not being recognized by the computer. It showed up in Finder initially, when I first plugged it in, and then when I went to the TimeMachine app and followed Mac’s steps to reformat it as a Time Machine, it said the drive didn’t have enough space and unmounted it. The error message said: “Unmounting disk. MediaKit reports not enough space on device for requested operation. Operation failed…” (This is a blank 4TB drive, trying to back up 1.4 TB of data, so space is not the issue.)
Repeated attempts to re-mount it aren’t working, and it also has similar messages when I’ve tried to erase it, restore it, mount it, etc. Nothing works. (The drive spins for hours if left connected, and when I “get info” that says that it can be verified and it can be repaired, so I’m hoping out hope that you’ll have some suggestions about how to fix it.
I’m hoping you will be able to reply soon! I really need to back up this computer. Thanks! (This is my 6th My Passport drive, and the only one I’ve ever had a problem using. I haven’t tried the others on this new computer, yet, though!)
Thank you very much for your response, James. I tried working through the steps and I got as far as #7. Unfortunately, after that it would not let me proceed to #8. Here’s the error message:
I tried it with each of the two external volume names selected, but neither of them worked. (Some other users reported that it would work when they tried the “WD My Passport” line, so I tried that as well as the “disk2s1” name below it.)
I also looked at the disk information screen and here’s what it says (before and after trying to reset it):
