MyBook not mounting, High Sierra or failure? Help!

Portable Drives My Passport
1

Turning to the community because I don’t want to believe that my drive has failed!

I have an older MyBook 1TB. Today, wanting to back up my computer I connected the drive, and it would not appear on my desktop. However, when I go into disk utility I can see it under external drives, but I cannot select it. I haven’t changed any settings in regards to the drive since the last time I back my computer up. The light on the hard drive flashes 2-3 times per second.

Upon perusing this thread, I can across some other who were having problems with their drives mounting in High Sierra (10.13.3). I’m just curious whether or not this could be apart of my problem…is there any way to fix this? I’ve already tried rebooting my computer and rebooting the drive multiple times. No luck.

Just trying to figure out what to do before I make the decision to take it into data recovery…

2

So I have few question for you:

  • Is your macOS APFS or APFS encrypted?

  • Before 10.13 was your WD hard drive working well?

Now, the part which is concerning.

If your drive hasn’t yet failed then why it showed as greyed out in Disk Utility? Try pressing Mount button on the physical drive in Disk Utility. For data recovery (last resort) check this video Free recover data from unmounted external hard drive on macOS Big Sur and others - YouTube

3

I actually downloaded Stellar Phoenix, left home while it was running and when I returned I could see my hard drive on my desktop. Hastily copied everything over to my computer, I think it’s time for me to buy a new hard drive!

4

Great! I wonder how running Stellar Phoenix made your WD appear on the Desktop? Was the software still scanning the drive and it appeared in between? Is your WD still accessible? Hope you managed to copy 100% of files from it.