WD My Passport is not showing up on Mac even though I can see it on the WD Discovery app?

Ryan_McL wrote:

I do not care about if there is any data on the Drive. I am just trying to gain access to it so I can use it again hopefully.

Use the Apple Support Document in link below to Totally Wipe the Drive

This will wipe ALL Data and lay down a New Partition Map

Once that is done

Do Not Use the WD Encryption Software on this Drive

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

If you were using the WD Passport's built-in hardware encryption, then you need to first unlock the drive before any OS will be able to see its contents. If you cannot unlock the drive, then your data is gone for good since that is the whole purpose of encrypting data. You may be able to re-use an encrypted drive by using the WD software to reset the drive, but that will destroy all data on the drive.

If you never formatted the WD Passport, then it is most likely using the NTFS file system from the factory. While macOS can read an NTFS volume, macOS cannot write to an NTFS volume. Plus if you are using the WD proprietary software to manage this external drive, then it is possible that software is not fully functional either because it needs to be updated, or possibly the macOS security has temporarily disabled a portion of this third party WD driver after a macOS update.

It is also possible this drive has suffered a hardware failure. If that is the case, then the more you attempt to access the drive, the more likely you are making the failure worse to where even a professional data recovery service will be unable to recover any data from it assuming you were not using the drive's built-in hardware encryption. Unfortunately if you were using the drive's hardware encryption, then it may be impossible to even get health information from the drive depending on whether this is an SSD or a hard drive & the type of hardware encryption being used.

You may need to recover your files from a backup you made before you started having issues with the WD Passport. And yes, people should have a backup of their external media (including the cloud) if it contains important & unique data.

PRP_53 wrote:

Use the Apple Support Document in link below to Totally Wipe the Drive

This will wipe ALL Data and lay down a New Partition Map

Once that is done

Do Not Use the WD Encryption Software on this Drive

Erase and reformat a storage device in Disk Utility on Mac

Unfortunately if the OP is using the My Passport's built-in hardware encryption, then this won't work. If the My Passport is an SED (Self Encrypting Drive with built-in hardware encryption), then the only way to the SED can be used again is by using the WD software to reset it using the PSID key on the SSD. If the My Passport is a hard drive, then I'm not sure if WD has a way to remove the lock.

If the OP used some software based encryption like Filevault or VeraCrypt, then erasing the whole physical drive as you suggested will work, but it won't if the drive is hardware encrypted or hardware locked. Unfortunately the OP hasn't confirmed anything. We've definitely provide the OP's only two options here, so hopefully they will figure it out and provide an update.

It sounds like you initially used the WD maintenance app to format the drive. This virtually always causes problems. These apps never work well with Macs. I recommend using only Disk Utility to reformat the disk and see if it can be seen. If not, then you likely have a disk that is failing.

If you enabled the drive's built-in hardware encryption, then you will need to use the WD software to reset the WD drive assuming it is an SSD. Check the documentation for your WD My Passport user manual.

If you did not use the WD MY Passport's built-in hardware encryption, then follow the advice provided by others to erase the whole physical drive.

Wait and see ?