WD Elements drive detected in system profiler but not disk utility or desktop

My WD elements external drive can be seen in system provider on my mac book but won’t be recognised on the desktop. I’ve read the support articles on reformatting however I haven’t been able to locate one that describes how to get the drive to be recognised not just in the system profiler but in the disk utility so that I can reformat.

Thanks!

Hello gstad,

I would suggest you to use WD Drive Utilities on your Mac to erase the WD Elements in Mac supported file format to use it further.

Otherwise, if drive not detects, it indicates drive would be faulty and need to replace from WD under warranty.

https://support.wdc.com/knowledgebase/answer.aspx?ID=10408