Western Digital Easystore not mounting and First AId errors

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127 points

Western Digital Easystore not mounting and First AId errors

Hi,

I am using a Western Digital Easystore 1 TB external drive for my Time Machine backups. I have it formatted as APFS. I am on 11.6.5 on my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Late 2013.

Last night it wouldn’t mount (and for a few previous nights it has beeb slow to...) so I looked into what was going on. Rebooting got it to mount (and Time Machine backed up as it should) but Disk Utility gave some errors when I tried to use First Aid.

The various error messages I got:

Trying to mount it:

Could not mount WD 1 TIme Machine com.apple.DiskManagement.dis enter error 49218

Using First AId on the container disk:

Storage system check exit code is 65.

Storage system verify or repair failed. : (-69716)

Using First Aid on the WD 1 Time Machine volume:

File system exit code is 65.

File system verify or repair failed. : (-69845)

SMART status is not supported.

Should I live with this and reboot as necessary or erase and start over. (Reformat as HFS+?) Return the drive as it may fail soon?

Thanks for any help.

Cheers,

John

MacBook Pro 15″, OS X 10.10

Posted on Apr 16, 2022 6:30 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Community+ 2026

Level 9

74,354 points

Apr 16, 2022 8:58 PM in response to lipwak

It is unfortunate Apple can only give error messages in the form of cryptic error codes which Apple does not list anywhere, but it seems like this error occurs very early and is likely severe.

You can try checking the health of the drive using DriveDx, but you will need to install a special USB driver as well. Even with the special USB driver, the enclosure for the external drive may not allow the necessary communication to access the drive's health information. Any "Warnings" or "Failing" conditions indicate a worn out or failing hard drive respectively. If you are using an external SSD, then post the complete DriveDx text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper since the drive health monitoring apps don't correctly interpret the health of SSDs.

Assuming the drive is healthy, then it would appear that First Aid is unable to repair the file system. You could try running First Aid on the physical drive. You may need to click "View" within Disk Utility and select "Show All Devices" so that the physical drives appear on the left pane of Disk Utility. You can also try running First Aid on the hidden Container. However, if this does not help, then you have no other option but to attempt to erase the whole physical drive since there are no third party utilities available to repair an APFS volume since Apple has not released the necessary APFS documentation. If this is just a data drive, then I would erase it HFS+. I think Big Sur still allows a TM drive to be HFS+ as well.

APFS really should not be used on hard drives as it causes excessive wear and is only meant for SSDs.

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Answer 2

tjk

Level 9

51,262 points

Apr 16, 2022 10:39 AM in response to lipwak

Hi,

The drive can no longer be trusted. It's time for a new drive.

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Answer 3

lipwak Author

Level 1

127 points

Apr 18, 2022 7:02 AM in response to lipwak

I reformatted it to Mac OS Extended (Journaled). I then chose it as my Time Machine disk which automatically converted it to APFS. The backup went well.

Now to see how well it holds up. I have a little less than a month before I have to return it (and am going on a trip inbetween where I'll want to use it). So, we'll see what happens.

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Answer 4

lipwak Author

Level 1

127 points

Apr 17, 2022 3:11 PM in response to HWTech

Thanks for this. I think I'll erase it and reformat it to HFS+. I have a return authorization that gives me some time. If things don't improve I'll send it back. (I did run First Aid on the drive and the container. The drive is fine. The container and Time Machine volume failed, giving the errors I mentioned above.)

I also ran WD's Drive Utility since then. I did all three tests and nothing wrong was detected.

I'm still going to reformat it later tonight and try using it as HFS+.

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Western Digital Easystore not mounting and First AId errors

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