My brand new My Passport 4TB don’t wake up when it goes to sleep.
I have downloaded and installed latest firmware with WD Drive Utillities but after some days it starts not to wake up again.
What to do?
All I get is just an empty window and no life. And when I unplug the cable it gives me error messages (unplugged wrongly).
When I try to eject normally it blocks because I have software open that works with a file on My Passport. Again I have to unplug the cable 
- or restart the whole computer.
This is utterly ■■■■!
Now I’ve tried everything with WD utilities but absolutely NOTHONG changes. I goes to sleep although I have turned that off and then it can’t wake up again.
My conclusion must be that the My Passport 4TB simply is broken. What else can it be?
It is partitioned into 500gb/3,5TB but that should not cause the problems as it has been working fine for a month.
I’m having the exact same troubles as you describe. Have you found a solution yet? Did a new unit solve the problem?
WD support suggested I should unmount the drive every time I set the iMac to sleep. Useless advice, never ever had to do that with a connected hard drive.
Have you noticed by the way the drive works fine if you wake the Mac up after a short while, let’s say 5 minutes or so? It only occurs after the Mac sleeps for a longer time.
I’m in doubt to enter the RMA, as I suspect faulty firmware. Is there a way maybe to downgrade the firmware?
Alright people, found the solution. Turns out the WD Discovery software is messing MacOS up. Remove every single trace, daemons included. Problem solved!
3 Likes
Hi Yoshi83,
Yes that definitely helps! I ended up with returning my Mys Passport and got a new one while deleting all the files too (on Mac) when using it so I can’t tell exactly what helped.
How do I find the daemons?
I had a similar problem with two identical My Passport for Mac 2 TB drives I purchased in January. When the Mac woke from sleep, no files or directories were visible on the drive until I force-ejected and remounted them. I went back and forth with WD tech support for months. I tried everything they suggested, and nothing worked. They replaced one of the drives with a My Passport Ultra, and it failed even more catastrophically-- when the Mac woke from sleep, the drive’s partition table became invisible to the O/S, and I had to reboot in order to get it back. WD tech support was quite difficult to work with, since the case would often be assigned to a new tech support representative every time I replied, and even when it wasn’t, they kept responding as if no one had read the conversation thus far. I had to keep repeating myself and answering the same questions over and over again. I finally stumbled upon this thread and was inspired to try uninstalling all WD software (including WD Utilities) from my Mac. It appears that that solved the problem. That’s a shame, because I also use a My Book Thunderbolt Velociraptor Duo, and WD Utilities is the only way to check the RAID status on the Duo.
This is an outrage. I notified WD back in May 2018 what the solution was. I asked them to make a note of known problems on the download page of this software and if I could speak to an engineer to help test and fix the problem. Never heard of them again.
I recently had to replace a 10+ year old WD My Book so chose the 4Gb MyPassport. The MyBook worked perfectly from day one, the MyPassport has been a absolute pain because of the issue described above. I’ve just deleted all the software, hopefully the drive will work as intended now.
I had the same problem after switching to a new MacBook (with MacOS Mojave). I had major problems to even connect to the existing WD MyPassport drive. This was only possible after I had removed the password via WD Security. I had reactivated the password on the new MacBook, but then I realized that the MyPassport drive/folder was empty every time after the MacBook woke up. I had to do a hard eject and ignore the warning that some programs are accessing the drive. This was very annoying!
I just deleted the password via WD Security and activated encryption via Finder (right click on drive). I’m only using this drive with MacOS. For security reasons I prefer to have all data on the MyPassport drive encrypted.
Now my Mac can fall asleep and the drive is still accessible after a wakeup. I haven’t remove the WD utilities so far (WD Drive Utilites and WD Security).
Hope this may help for other users with the same problem.
I tried this based on suggestion here with Thanks to @Yoshi83 and it seems worked for me.
I removed WD Discovery software, uninstalled from my iMac and restarted. After that, I left iMac unattended to let it go in sleep mode, overnight as well as manually selected Sleep from Apple menu options. Every time when I woke it up, these WD drives are now being active and all volumes are up and running.
Wester Digitial team - If you are reading this, please fix your WD Discovery software. It was supposed to solve a problem, not to be a Problem… Thanks again to @Yoshi83.
Regards,
Neeraj
Hi Yoshi83,
I am having problems finding My Passport in Finder. Please help. I have a ton of files that I can’t afford to lose. Any suggestions.
Can you see the WD is recognized by macOS by looking in Disk Utility?
No It is not seen
Also I’ve noticed that I can’t close or force quit finder
Pls help
Boot your Mac in safe mode and try to access your files. Press shift and hold while powering up your Mac until the apple logo appears.
Hi bgbolton,
I’m in your exactly same situation. Have you found a solution? My WD is not recognized by the Mac (it doesn’t appear anymore) please help.
WD Engineers, please fix this problem, it has been 4 years since being reported and nothing from WD to fix this issue. I had just purchased My Passport for Mac Ultra, read all the specs and they met my requirements and purchase the drive at my local Big Box Retailer. Installed WD Discovery, including adding password protection. Several backups (Time Machine) ran the first day. I noticed the next day, that received message that no backups during that next day, I then hit the ‘Back up Now’ on Time Machine, received an error. Drive was still connected but would not backup. I then shut my Mac down, restarted and plugged the drive in again and was able to backup. Left the machine alone over night but the next day but was not able to backup again. Used the same process as before and the no backup issue was there again the next day. Searched the Community comments and found the 'My Passport don’t wake up on Mac. Yoshi83 found a solution, it is the WD Discovery software interfering with the Mac OS, I tried on Big Sur and then on Monterey, same issue as before. This drive is being returned because I am not going to pay for features that will not work.
I own presently two other WD drives which work great, no issue for the past few years. This is a major disappointment and I will not be purchasing WD drives in the future because engineering is not acknowledging and fixing a known issue. Unacceptable. I found a couple of options offered by companies headquartered in the US, which is my preference is to purchase products from US companies.
Oh wow this still isn’t fixed?
