WD MyPassport Ultra 2TB Does Not Mount But Passes All Tests

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
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The drive does not mount.

It appears as a blank drive with no partitions in disk utility.

It passes SMART, Quick Drive Test, and Complete Drive Tests in WD Drive Utilities.

Does not appear at all under DiskWarrior 4.4, though other disks do.

Drive was last used to copy a significant amount of footage from an Avid Media Composer project, as well as to store MP4 and other various video formats, raw camera and audio dumps. This was a transfer drive from a company and they deleted the files before I had backed them up, so I unfortunately do not know exact file types, file structure, etc… Making it unlikley for basic data recovery software to be able to detect the filetypes (ie an Avid MXF).

There is no physical damage to the drive.

Issue is under OS X 10.9.4 on custom built computers and Macbook Pros.

Other identical model drives work fine using the same cable, and on these same computers. This is one drive of a set which are being used for this purpose, so the issue appears localized to this specific drive.

Others in this thread appear to have had similar problems: http://community.wd.com/t5/External-Drives-for-Mac/WD-My-passport-not-mounting-in-mac/td-p/617423/page/4

Unlikely for the drive to ever have been removed without being properly ejected, so while the symptoms do appear to be those of corruption, not sure how or why that would have happened. Additionally, unless this occurred during a write operation to the disk, I can’t imagine it happening. With hundreds of drives over the past decade plus, I’ve never lost a drive due to failure to properly eject, only from known issues like age, physical failure, etc…

Has anyone else had this problem? Is this a problem that is localized to WD drives? I am more familiar with G Technology, Lacie, and Glyph drives, so I’m treading in new territory here.

Thanks for your help,

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Some further information.

Techtool Pro 7.0.5 does not find any bad sectors. Does not show any volumes for me to rebuild.

FileSalvage locates 40 files on what appears to be the WD SmartWare volume (I opened some and found the standard PDF documents, etc), and appears to identify two other volumes of about 620mb, but does not find files or allow me to repair and rebuild a volume. StellarPhoenix identifies these as “Recovery” volumes, but does not locate anything other than these three.

Have tried creating custom file types to identify video files, but no luck; I’m not sure I know of any software which recognizes AVCHD / MTS Program Streams. Other footage was GoPro, BlackMagic, and Canon wrapped H264s.

This is kind of bizarre. I’ve never experienced this before. I’ve had drives which have suffered complete hard crashes because of power loss while doing writes to the disk, and never seen anything like this. It’s like the drive is fine, but thinks there’s nothing there.

There’s clearly something wrong, however, as even the basic WD SmartWare volume doesn’t mount. If it were just a blank drive I should get the default partitions.

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Hello,

If you are unable to recover the files using data recovery software then I recommend you contact a data recovery company.

Data Recovery

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This is not exactly helpful.

I am highly technical and have a CS degree. Is there a manual or discussion about the processes these services use?

I have only used them in the past when a driver is physically compromised; I’ll leave mashing together parts from a donor and an injured drive to professionals, but any software based task I should be able to learn fairly easily.

This seems like a pretty common problem with these drives, and I feel like WD should explain what tools to use and how to use them the way data-recovery professionals would given the repeated discussion of the potential for “corruption.” I’ve never seen a drive which sounds so prone to this.

Unless the tools themselves are more than several thousand dollars, this should be a viable option. My guess is they’re almost all open source, just highly specialized so if you don’t know where to look, you’ll never find them.

Has anyone tried this recovery process themselves?

That said, WD Support is calling me, so hopefully I’ll get some direction. I just figured the community might have some aggregated knowledge or experience with this.