Last winter I bought a WD EasyStore external HD to use as a Time Machine back up for my MacBook Pro. Recently, my Mac won’t recognize it anymore. I connect the drive and the light flashes but nothing appears on my desktop or finder window. When I try to run Disc Utility, I get a spinning wheel and nothing happens until I take the USB cable connected to the external out of my mac. Then Disc Utility works. Somehow, it seems my hard drive got stuck, perhaps while trying to eject…??..I should add that I recently changed the name of my Time Machine backup. Before all this happened, I got a message saying that Time Machine couldn’t find the disc it was looking for, but using the old name.
It WILL however show up in the System Report under ‘About This Mac’ and also in Terminal. So it does see it, but I have no access to my data. Right now I’m running WD Drive Utilities on it but it takes forever. Anyone have any ideas how I can get my Time Machine disc back??! Thank you.
Did you upgrade your macOS and after the upgrade the drive is invisible?
Sounds like the hard drive has some issues. Are you able to repair your TM drive with the Disk Utility?
I am not sure if ‘changing the name’ can corrupt the Time Machine however you should not change the name. TM drives are exclusive for Macs and not like any other file system. So, we should just leave it with what it has initially.
Do you have the backup of the data somewhere else? I mean if your data on the Time Machine is same as on your Mac then you could possible erase your external drive with the Time Machine application. Erasing will eliminate logical disk errors. Let know further.
Thanks for your answer. I ended up running a disc utility offered by WD, from their website. I ran an extensive verification process and that did the trick! Highly recommend this for other with the same problem:
