My WD “My Passport for Mac” 2TB disk has (see screen shots below) the “WD Virtual CD 0829 Media” and the “WD Unlocker” thingies which I wanted to get rid of as I had problems with these in the past. I used the Disk Utility “Erase” command for that but to no avail.
I thus entered the WD disk password and ran a backup.
All went fine and some 500+ GB of data were backed up (See WD Backup disk info below)
Currently, in Finder, the external drive does not appear as mounted. However, when I click on the WD drive icon on the desktop, I see this:
This issue already happened to me in the past and when I Force Ejected the drive, it became no longer usable and Disk Utility could not fix it.
I am stuck and at a loss not daring to shut down my MAC. Your help and advice is much appreciated.
Note that I have a full backup already on an external Maxtor disk so I don’t mind reformatting my external WD drive and starting a backup anew but I dare not do that before someone advises me.
Can you please provide the drive model of the Passport device? Also, have you tried the device on a different computer? If not, and if possible, please do so to see if you get the same issue.
The drive model is “My Passport Ultra for Mac 2 TB (S/N: [Deleted])”.
The last time a similar issue occurred to me, my disk, which I had then force ejected, worked fine on another Mac though on mine I could not mount it again and even the Disk Utility couldn’t fix it. Unfortunately, I do not have another Mac nearby and, as things stand, I would be a bit reluctant to force eject the “ailing” drive to try it yet on another Mac!
The similar old issue I had was then deemed to be related to the old OS I had (Snow Leopard 10.6.8). I upgraded to “El Capitan” and also had the HW beefed-up to 8 GB RAM and 2 TB internal hard disk. The problem then was resolved and I could mount my disk again till … this new issue cropped up.
Maybe this new issue is different and perhaps something went wrong when I tried to erase the virtual CD/Unlocker folder(s). I see that the WD Unlocker shows in grey under the Disk Utility as shown above.
I don’t know if this helps but I would like to mention that my Maxtor disk works fine. It does not have the Password locking feature of the WD disk though. Note that I do not need the PW locking feature on the WD drive. The feature came with the WD drive and I would like to get rid of it which is what I attempted to do by trying to erase the virtual CD/Unlocker folder(s) with the Disk Utility. Things appear to have gone wrong then. Perhaps I need to reinstall something (driver?, …).
Some more news and, hopefully, the problem got fixed.
I kept my Mac running and my 2 TB disk mounted until … the system crashed (my 1st Mac crash in 7 years!). The system rebooted with my 2 TB disk still physically connected. It mounted fine. I was prompted for the disk Password which I entered.
As you can see above, in comparison with my post of April 24th above, the “WD Unlocker” is mounted along with the “WD Backup Disk”. In addition the 2017-04-24-085139.InProgress folder is gone.
My conclusion is that some backup process was locking the WD disk and preventing its dismounting, though I had closed “Time Machine” and “Time Machine Preferences”. “Killing” that backup process would probably have released the disk and allowed its dismounting.
As this issue may happen again, and not only to me, would anyone know which Backup process to kill/quit, assuming it is a viable/advisable option, when a backup appearing in progress actually hangs.
Many thanks to the WD Community. This is a very useful forum.
