I bought a 3TB WD Elements External drive in May 2020, connected it to my Mac OS X 10.11.6, formatted it and every thing worked well. Bought a new Seagate earlier and encountered other problems and thought wow, WD is great! I use the WD for my Time Machine Backups.
Yesterday, I got a notification and there was a red exclamation mark in Time Machine saying there was a problem with a folder. I decided to eject the WD and reconnect again. The WD icon on my desktop disappeared and also, it was not to be seen in Finder. Luckily, I found it under Disk Utilities. However, the folder which was in it and which I had titled Time Machine Elements disappeared and in its place was a seemingly empty folder called Untitled. I decided to run First Aid and it gave me some kind of a message that I had to save my data and reformat it. (Not sure how I could have done that cos the data was nowhere to be seen.) Since this drive was only used for backups, I decided to reformat it. The folder reappeared and so did the icon on my desktop.
So now it seemed, all I had to do was get Time Machine to backup again. Alas, same exclamation mark. First Aid report says:
File record has hard link chain (id=177)
File record has hard link chain (id=178)
File record has hard link chain (id=179)
File record has hard link chain (id=182)
File record has hard link chain (id=183)
Invalid sibling link.
Rebuilding Catalog B tree
Rechecking volume
The volume could not be verified completely.
File system check exit code is 8.
Updating Boot support partitions for the volume as (sentence unfinished).
File system verify or repair failed.
Operation failed.
And now the icon has disappeared from my desktop and the folder is called Untitled again.
I do not have WD Disk Utility installed (solution given in other forums).
I am at a loss at what to do. I have already reformatted twice, changed the settings to allow “read and write”.
My warranty is still valid.
Any help would be appreciated.
