Hi, everyone! Thanks for checking this thread. It would be greatly appreciated if could help me out with this problem so I’m just going to lay it on you. I’ll try to provide as much detail as possible but if you have any questions about something that I missed, feel free to ask here so here goes:
So, I have a WD My Passport Essential 500 GB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive that I purchased from either Target or Costco some time ago. I don’t quite remember when or which store but that shouldn’t really matter. While I was backing up this external hard drive, my Mac crashed and restarted all on its own. I have a m_id-2009 13" MacBook Pro 2.26 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with a 160 GB hard drive and 8 GB RAM_ running on OS X 10.9.1 Mavericks.
After the computer crashed during the back-up process using Time Machine, my external hard drive refuses to show up on the desktop and the devices in Finder. The odd thing is, the virtual CD (WD Smartware_ _or something like that) appears on in the devices pane and the desktop but everything in it does not work.
After this happened, I tried to reformat the hard drive using Disk Utility but it tells me it cannot unmount the disk and therefore cannot erase the drive. I have tried erasing it and even partitioning it and then erasing but that wouldn’t work either. Disk Utility, when I try to verify the disk tells me that it needs to be repaired but when I click “repair”, it gives me an error that it cannot be repaired.
I’m not too worried about the contents of the hard drive (well, I am and it would be great if I could get my family photos and music back) but it’s not a big deal at this point. I just want the hard drive to work again. If I can’t, I guess my last resport is to buy a new one.
Thanks so much for reading and even maybe trying to help me resolve the issue!
-Ellie <3
Greetings EmpressEllie,
The drive partition seems to have got corrupted when the computer restarted.
You can attempt to retrieve the files using a Data Recovery software.
Some users have been able to reformat corrupted drives using a different operating system like Windows or by attempting a Firmware update which could be a last resort.
Let me know if any of those works.
When an HD is being read from or written to and there is a problem, such as loss of power - which may have happened since the Mac re-booted - the drive’s directory is ruined. The data is still on the drive but it can’t be found by the system. It might be possible to recover the data with recovery tools. Go to MacUpdate or LifHacker and review the current recommendations for recovery software. I have read that Western Digital secures the drive’s with encryption automatically. So, check around in the Western Digital site to see what they say about recovering encrypted data. It may be that even if the data can be recovered, it can’t be decrypted by third party software. After the fact is not much help, but there is software that makes ongoing copies of disk directories. This software might help if the encryption problem can be solved. Later that is. Since you did not have this running, it is too late to try it now.
In response to the first post:
Unfortunately I don’t have a PC running Windows that I can use to reformat the drive… are there any other options available to me using just my Mac?
In response to the first and second posts:
Also, as for recovering the data, do you have any free programs that are compatibale with a Mac that you would suggest I try?
Can anyone else help me out? It would be much appreciated. :wink:
Just a little update and a question… would this be the reformatting tool I would use on my Mac to reformat my WD Passport USB 2.0? Here’s the link : http://support.wd.com/product/download.asp?groupid=203&sid=108&lang=en
