My Western Digital Elements 1TB has started giving me the message “the disk inserted was not readable by this computer” every time I connect it to my Mac computer via USB port. I’ve tried rebooting my laptop, and ejecting disk for more than a minute, but neither helped. It was working without a problem last night and this morning, and then stopped. I’ve also tried to go through disk utility to repair disk; the drive shows up to be selected, but none of the action buttons are enabled.
I have the exact same problem! What can we do? Can it be fixed? My Elements 1 terrabyte external hard drive was fine one day and then not the next. I get the same message. What went wrong?
seems the disk is corrupted. try on a different computer with a different cable.
Try updating the firmware on a Windows Computer if possible
None of the options in Disk Utility are active because the drive isn’t mounted. When these drives report errors to the operating system, the OS takes them offline. If you highlight the volume (the label below the drive), at the bottom of the Disk Utility screen there is a small summary of the mounted device, see if it says not mounted, then try to mount it. It will most likely tell you there are errors on the drive.
I know this because I’m copying all of my data off one that is behaving the same way!
