I have a WDBKXH5000ABK My Passport external drive. It was working on my son’s MacBook Pro but recently stopped being recognized. The power light is on and it sounds like the disk is spinning. I will reformat once I can access it but I also wanted to make sure to backup whatever is on the drive first. Any suggestions?
If this drive was on a Mac, it was formatted for a Mac, so don’t put it on a PC or try to reformat it on a PC. Unless done correctly it will be unusable on the Mac. Power lights and spinning is a good sign the drive components are healthy enough, physically.
Sometimes computers “forget” the drive is attached to it and the drivers for a drive need to be reinstalled. Does the Mac (not the PC) acknowledge that the drive is at least connected to it? If it does not, that is another sign the computer lost track of the drive. Even if it does acknowledge the drive’s presence, I would try to uninstall the drive from the Mac, then take off drive, and reboot the computer and when things are ready again just plug in the drive and see if it reinstalls to computer.
