WD My Passport 4TB drive failing to mount on Mac - corruption error when attempting repair with disk utility

[Gomezgee]

I have a 4TB WD My Passport, just over a year old, it is encrypted and formatted in AFPS.

I’m running a 2020 M1 Macbook Pro on latest OS - Sonoma 14.0

I saved a bunch of my drone videos and photos from a recent trip on it just last week with no issues, I ejected it properly as I always do.

I went to access it the over the weekend and it all of a sudden started asking me for my password, this didn’t happen prior, as I have it saved on my mac. I inputted my password and nothing happened, it still would not mount. I ended up trying multiple passwords, thinking maybe I had used the wrong one. One iteration seemed to work, the password login disappeared but still it did not mount.

I have NTFS for Mac from Paragon Software installed, as I do run portables in other formats, and this recognises the drive, however it too will not mount it. Using this software my drive fails verification and also fails repair.

I then attempted to use Disk Utility, this too recognises that it is connected, however only the Partition map and container are blue, the volume is greyed out.

When running first aid on the partition map, it comes back as fine, however when running first aid on both the container and the volume, it fails as above.

I have since downloaded Disk Drill, and it is able to recover all the data off the drive, the strange thing is that it’s showing over 6TB recoverable, although im only using about 2.5TB, the issue I have now is I do not have a spare drive to back the data up to, in order to then try reformatting this drive and backing the data back up to it.

I guess my question is, has anyone encountered this issue, is there a software out there that actually can repair the drive, do WD offer anything?

Since Disk Drill can see all my files, and I can preview them, why are the repairs failing?

Please see all screenshots attached of my issue.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Gomezgee]

Additional screenshots;

[Keerti_01]

Hi @Gomezgee,

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

[telicha]

I have a similar problem - WD My Passport 5TB fails to mount after upgrading to Sonoma. When I plug in the drive, it shows up the usual WD app that can use for unlocking the drive. However, after the driver is successfully unlocked, it does not mount the partitions - cannot even see the partitions with diskutil list - just says got disk7 of 5.0 TB size. Before you tell me to check cables, etc. I can put the very same drive with the very same cable into a computer running Big Sur and I can operate it normally as before, clearly the problem is with Sonoma. Is there a way to fix it? Thanks

[telicha]

I had a similar problem. In the end I had to reinstall (from scratch) Ventura. Seems that every time they change the OS something doesn’t work anymore for the Mac. It seems the problem had to do with the encryption and the sequence in which the disk is accessed, but I am not sure.

Please let everyone know if Apple (ever) fixes this problem and which version of Sonoma or follow-up you’re running.