My daughter has a photos library on a WD external drive. It will mount and then pull up the photos library but then after a few minutes it quits and the library disappears. I have tried to run first aid on the disk but it says fixing the damaged partition map and then fails. Im wondering if there is anything else I can do to repair it?
iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.14
had the same issue with an external WD harddisk, I opened the box and took out the harddrive itself and put it in a external hd reader kinds like these hard drive reader | Newegg.com
there it worked fine so I suppose WD had more expertise at making the harddrives themselves than making the power supllies and electronics in the external enclosure.
it still work to this day, and it was 10 years ago that the external box died
had the same issue with an external WD harddisk, I opened the box and took out the harddrive itself and put it in a external hd reader kinds like these hard drive reader | Newegg.com
there it worked fine so I suppose WD had more expertise at making the harddrives themselves than making the power supllies and electronics in the external enclosure.
it still work to this day, and it was 10 years ago that the external box died
Make sure the external drive is formatted as APFS or MacOS Extended (and Finder > Get Info says "Ignore permissions on this volume, which should be the default).
Photos libraries are not supported on non-Mac volumes like FAT, exFAT etc.
Try one of these two…
You can use Drive DX to possibly get a better view of Drive health…
https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx
Thanks to Jack-19…
It may be wise to run SMART Utility to check the drives' health.
Maybe the drive is failing.
How is it connected -- via a hub or directly to the Mac? HDD or SSD? Does it have its own power supply?
It was erased and formatted for Mac. It had worked fine for probably a year so I’m not sure what changed.
HDD connected by USB to the Mac. Trying to move the library to another drive and see if that will allow me to use it?
Its an older Mac so unfortunately neither of these are available for it.
Indeed, the HD Manufactures all seem to fail miserably with their cases or interfaces, no matter how great their drives are.
Photos library on external drive failing
