Q: WD External drive won't mount

Highlight it in Activity Monitor & click on the Quit icon.

This worked for me too!! I recovered a drive using phoenix as I assumed it was corrupted but then got exactly same problems again on the new drive!! Deleting fsck_hfs worked! Thanks a million.

i am recovering my files on what seems to be a bad WD My Book Silver right now. the error was "the disk you inserted cannot be read" allowing me to either ignore or eject. this double firewire 800/USB 2TB drive held 1.7TB of active backups from two computers going back to 2010, my master Aperture photo libraries, raw photos, videos, audio of recordings done back to 2007 and transcribed talks. i'm a writer, author, spiritual teacher, and photographer literally in the process of brining in a team of three people to go through all my work after a health challenge for 18 months made me realize i needed to use what i have.

one day i was working on checking on the drive and transferring files on a 2010 iMac, prepping things for a newer, faster Mac Mini. the next day, my writing intern couldn't access the drive because of that message on any of our four machines. ugh! WD---we have to backup our backups?

the drive would not show.

Disk Utility could see a drive, but not the partitions and repair wasn't available.

after trying many different things:

including Wondershare Recovery which bills itself as specifically for WD drives, i remembered and pulled out my serial number and downloaded the newest version of Data Rescue 3. i did this after refreshing my memory about the best solutions. i have DiskWarrior, Drive Genius and Data Rescue:

Data Rescue it saw the drive and partitions on it's first Quick Scan.

because of the slow read resulting from the failing drive and having to recover to a USB drive, after 8 hours, i'm up to 170G of the most important first 370G recovered. but it's working.

after recovering the important stuff in stages (i won't recover backups -- will just backup anew from the computers) i will try DiskWarrior, which after much research, seems to be the only utility that may be able to save the drive. and i'm looking into Scannerz which has been reported as the best detection tool for any kind of problem, including in the cables.

i am reluctant to give up multiple access (firewire800/400/usb) drive even though i know lightning is taking over, i haven't the money for the transition everywhere. so my queries:

- hard drive recommendations for someone still using an array of older peripheral machines (i.e., non-lightning) and preferring firewire/USB

- i *really* wanted to see if the fsck_hfs quit process could help, but couldn't see that at all in Activity Monitor. i sorted the processes by name and though it wasn't entirely alphabetical, i think i peered through all 200 and couldn't locate it.

is there a certain point at which i should be looking for that process? as the drive is attempting to mount (though it fails)? after?

any help would be appreciated.

i wrote this longer post, because even though these things don't happen often, i know we are all soooo grateful for the one little tip or trick or pointer to a tool that gets us out of a jam, especially a potentially expensive, time-costly, but unsuccessful data recovery process.

thank you to everyone who shared here back through the last couple years.

Great to hear, thanks!

Whew, fsck doesn't seem to be your problem.

Using Disk Warrior, try holding alt or option key when selecting rebuild, that'll make a good temporary directory quite often & allow you to copy or even clone to a new drive.

For FW drives...

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/

The caveat is that if you have a PPC Mac, they may not be bootable unless daisy chained to an older model FW Drive.

sakuny, I think I might know your problem, I hope it is not too late but when in activity monitor what you need to do to locate ''fsck_hfs'' is to go to the tab where you see ''My Processors'' and change it to ''All Processors''. Then you just search for ''fsck_hfs'' and you should find it with no problems. From there you just need to highlight and force quit it.

I just wanted to sign up and thank BDAqua for saving my life. I really, truly appreciate your solution man thank you thank you!

Great to hear, thanks!

hi MiQelangelo,

I now had a new MyDrive Studio and will be headed toward wiling the old drive, but I will definitely try your solution first thank you for sharing.

sakuny

--

from a device

Having the similar access issues with mybook II.  from my macbook, I was able to access the external drive once  - a pop-up went up and said it couldn't fix the drive but that I can copy/move files which was great.  I was able to move a few folders and then it stopped copying.  I reset the mybook and macbook but I can't get the mybook to mount anymore.   I tried looking for that fsck_hfs process but I can't find it in activity monitor.  Any suggestions? thanks in advance!

I tried looking for that fsck_hfs process but I can't find it in activity monitor.

It may not be there, but did you show All Processes?

It may be in your case the drive is dying, it's possible some other Data Recovery SW might work, like DiskWarrior or Data Rescue.

Thanks to everyone - I found this thread very useful, although I also didn't find the fsck_hfs process in my Activity Monitor.

What I *did* find was a process called fsck_exfat. (My external drive has been exfat formatted so as to allow me to copy files from my Windows laptop as well).

When I killed the fsck_exfat process I could see files on my unmountable drive and copy them to my other external, exfat-formatted WD drive (why one works and one doesn't is a mystery).

I plan to copy all my files across then reformat the drive for Mac OS Extended and see if it's more reliable that way.

How was your drive formatted Bongu? Maybe you need to look for a different process (although not a good idea to just randomly quit any process, so check how your drive is formatted, and that you are quitting the relevant process!)

Hope this helps!

Hi,

I realize this thread is over a year old, but I'm having an issue that seems slightly different than what's been posted...

I have a 2 TB Western Digital Desktop External HD and it's showing up gray with the partition in Disk Utility, while not mounting in finder. I have tried numerous times to verify and then repair in disk util. 8 times out of ten, when i get to the point that it prompts me to repair, upon clicking repair, shortly afterwards the computers keyboard ceases to function and the mouse will freeze for 15-20 second periods. I end up hard resetting and having to turn on/off the external several times before it will even show up in disk util again.

The other two times out of ten, when I click repair, on occasion the message will come up to "back up as many files as possible" and I will actually see the drive mounted in finder. However, once I click the drive, then everything freezes and I have to reset.

Any suggestions here? I am a Songwriter/Producer and foolishly had the past three years of work on this thing without another backup. I have to get it back!

Thanks in advance,

Jake

Jake, what format is the drive?

Mac OS Extended.