I have a 4TB old-series My Book that I use for Time Machine, that became unreadable after a power outage during backup. The drive showed as grey and unmountable in Disk Utility. It couldn’t be neither repaired nor formatted from there.
I tried WD Drive Utility (latest version for Mojave, 2.1.1.127), and it showed the drive as with no units inside. So, I decided to format it.
Contrary to the Mac’s Disk Utility, this one started formatting it. After about ten minutes it reached 50%, and it is not there since at least 6 hours.
The drive’s LED is flashing. WD Drive Utilities is taking something like 1% of the CPU.
Is this normal behavior? I guess it is doing low-level formatting of the drive, and I know this is a very slow operation. Should I not worry, and let it go on overnight and even more?
Have you opened a Support Case? If not opened, for more information, please contact the WD Technical Support team for the best assistance and troubleshooting: https://support-en.wd.com/app/ask
Yup, and I received some useful answers. In the meantime, I had used WD Drive Utilities to try to reformat it. It took more than 15 hours, and then the power broke in my neighborhood, and I had to restart formatting.
It then took very short, but the drive was unreadable.
I then disconnected everything, restarted my Mac, and then tried with the Mac Drive Utility, and formatted the drive with a single pass of zeros. It apparently worked, after some ten hours of formatting.
I’m not sure it is really remapped, however. Time Machine has done a few backups on it, but it is the second time I get a message of backup not possible. The drive couldn’t even be removed, but only force-ejected.
I then used Disk Utility for a first aid pass, and it seem to restore it to functioning. WD Drive Utilities says the SMART is fine, it passes the quick check, but that it doesn’t pass the detailed check (maybe because this test checks for the bad sectors remapped by Disk Utility).
According to the support, the drive may start failing. At the moment it is working fine, and since I use it in alternation with another backup drive, I’ll see what will happen in the next weeks.
Disk Utility is one of the most resourceful utility tools in Mac that offers tons of features. First Aid is one of them. First Aid on Mac helps fix some disk problems when the disk is not working properly. However, it sometimes can fail to repair the disk.
Below are the solutions user can try to fix the issue:
