My WD external hard drive is failed

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

My WD passport is failed as my Mac is unable to read it at all and I have a gazillion very important information on it . Can someone please help me point me what to do .
Thank you :pray:t5:

2

Hi,
First of you need to figure out the reasons why WD External Hard drive is not showing.
There are several possibilities for a WD My Passport hard drive going invisible on a Mac system. Those possibilities could range from:

  1. Corrupt partition table
  2. APFS or HFS file system
  3. Cryptic Disk errors
  4. Hard drive faulty cable
  5. Wear and tear
  6. Failed Restore
  7. Bad blocks on the surface
  8. Failed Partitioning on External Drive.

Identifying an Unmounting WD My Passport?

You can try the below actions to determine if the WD external hard drive is mounting on your Mac:

1. Connect the WD My Passport external drive to your computer

2. Wait for the drive to appear in the Finder and Desktop. If the WD gives no response after getting connected with the Mac, go to Finder << Preferences and confirm if External Disks is selected.
On a healthier external drive, the above option works flawlessly. However, it may not work if your storage drive has one of those eight issues mentioned above.

3. Go to Disk Utility and identify if your WD external hard drive is listed on the left-hand side of the interface. Again, if the external drive is Ok, it will get listed without any issue; however, if the WD device is logically corrupt, it might appear in Disk Utility though greyed out. Also, a physically damaged external hard drive will not appear in the Disk Utility panel. For such cases, you need to contact a reliable data recovery lab service.

Steps to Mount Back a Greyed out External Drive

(i) Select & Click Mount – Choose the external hard drive on the partition level and see if the Mount button is working? When clicked on a working device, the Mount button brings back the external hard drive for further access. However, if the disk is corrupt, then the Mount button may not offer any help. Try switching to the partition level and again press the Mount button.
(ii) To Erase or Not to Erase the External Drive? – If you erase the non-mounting external hard drive with the Disk Utility, then it maps a new partition scheme on the device. Disk Utility will fix the problem, and you will be able to see your WD device again. But this operation will cause data loss on the external drive. Hence, this method is feasible only when the data inside the external hard drive is already secured somewhere, or data is of no use.
(iii) A Better Solution – Ignore the Methods shared in (i) and (ii). Instead, try performing data recovery on the external hard drive first. Stellar Data Recovery offers a free version and a Pro version of data recovery software to help you recover files from an unmounted external drive. In the Free version, you can retrieve 1 GB of files from the external drive without any charge, whereas, in the Pro version, there is no limit of size.
Hope this helps out.

3

Whenever you connect an external drive to your mac, the storage drive failed to connect and it may not show up on Desktop, Finder, or even on Disk Utility due to various reasons:

  1. USB connectivity problem
  2. macOS preference settings
  3. Partition map damage
  4. Device incompatibility
  5. Physical damage on a drive

However, to fix the issue, you can try the below methods:

  1. Check the USB connectivity
  2. Enable visibility of external hard drive
  3. Update macOS
  4. Repair external hard drive by using Disk Utility
  5. Repair external hard drive by using Terminal
  6. Erase the external hard drive & try recovering data using data recovery software
  7. If none of the above works, then the drive may needs replacement

Further, you can also check the below link for steps to be followed in each method mentioned above:

Hope it helps!

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