My Passport for Mac will not mount or repair. Please help!

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hello there!

I have a 2TB WD My Passport for Mac that I use as the Time Machine for my mid-2010 13-inch MacBook Pro. I also use it as a portable external hard drive to store other important files and my iTunes library. It has stopped mounting. Also, when I start up Disk Utility, it takes a long time to appear on the list on the left hand side and when it does and I attempt to use First Aid, it fails and gives the following text:

Repairing file system.
Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
Invalid extent entry
The volume could not be verified completely.
File system check exit code is 8.
Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.
File system verify or repair failed.
Operation failed…

Is there some way I can repair the hard drive and avoid losing all my data?

I have had the hard drive for a couple of years and it has always worked perfectly. It is also used as the Time Machine for my girlfriend’s 2011 15-inch MacBook Pro and the problem started when I tried to do a Time Machine backup on her computer this morning. It was preparing the backup for some time because it had been a while since it had been backed up. While it was doing this, her Mac “Restarted because of problem” and since then the my hard drive that was connected has the problems above. I can only assume that the problem that caused her Mac to restart also corrupted my hard drive somehow.

Please help! I cannot lose the data on the hard drive!

Thanks in advance,

Paul

2

Hello,

If you want to recover your data I recommend you use a data recovery software. If this does not work then contact a data recovery company.

You may try formatting the drive in order to use it again but this will delete all data stores in it.

3

Hello Paul,

I second Hamlet’s reply of file recovery from an unmounted drive. You can run the free trial of Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery on your unmounted WD external hard drive. The free trial will show you all the files that can get restored from this ex-HDD. Make data recovery your priority and after salvaging the files successfully, re-format the ex-HDD either with Disk Utility << Erase or Terminal Command Lines. I am sharing a couple of article for your help:

  1. How to recover data from an unmounted hard drive

  2. Reformat an external drive with Terminal.app

4

I ran into a similar problem yesterday. After using My Passport drive for about 3 years for Time Machine backups, yesterday my Mac failed to mount it so Time Machine kept waiting for it to be available. When I opened the Mac drive utilities, the wheel just continued to spin forever when I had the drive plugged into the USB port. I downloaded the WD drive utilities and the first test, Drive Status Check, passed, but the Quick Drive Test failed.

I proceeded to order a replacement drive, and then on a lark, I put my passport in the fridge for an hour or so. When I took it out and connected it to my Mac, voila, it was now recognized and actually completed a fairly large backup. As I sit here writing this 24 hours later, it is still successfully backing up my Mac.

Many years ago I used heat and cold to help troubleshoot digital circuitry hoping to change an intermittent problem into a permanent one. Looks like my fridge may have done the opposite. In any case, when the new 2T drive comes, I’ll try moving the old backup data to it and shelve this one. I hope you find a happy ending too.