I have a WD Elements external drive that I used with Time Machine on my old Macbook Air. I am trying to use it with my new MacBook Pro (running Tahoe 26.3) but it is not recognizing the drive.
I checked the boxes to show external drives in finder settings, and the power light on the drive is illuminated. I ran first aid in Disk Utility. I restarted a couple times.
Any ideas?
MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 26.3
As I see it, there are two cases:
A) you DO want to add-on to the backup set that is already on the drive.
in that case, you should be offered the ability to "inherit" the previous backup.
if that is not happening, there are Terminal commands that can be used to coerce Time Machine to inherit that backup set, but they are NOT trivial and there is no known simple recipe.
here is a reference article:
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/if-your-new-mac-inherits-your-backup-history-mh35732/mac
B) you want the Drive, but are willing to start over staring today.
In that case, just use disk utility to ERASE the drive. Once it no longer has backups on it, Time Machine will be willing to write to it.
(Your pre-existing backup set is what is preventing that drive from being available for Time Machine to RE-use.)
Much more information is available, just ask.
Was your past MacBook an intel chip or an apple silicon MacBook? If answer A (intel), you need to download all data onto another device with an intel chip (or your old MacBook if possible), wipe the disk, and convert the software of the HDD to exFAT(also on an intel device), and put your data back on, hope this helps!
WD Elements external drive not recognized by new MacBook Pro
