wd passport bu drive

macOS 11 can't mount some older WD Passport drives if they're formatted NTFS or use WD's old software. Open Disk Utility and see whether the drive shows up. If it does, you can copy files off, then reformat it as APFS or exFAT (this erases it). If it's NTFS, macOS can read it but not write; WD Discovery isn't needed. Back up first before erasing.

ferdd4 wrote:

Thanks for the reply but I have 10 years of data backups and don't have a source to back it up while I erase the disk. I ordered a new back up drive. WD support was worthless to fix the interface issue.

Thanks for your help

Clearly the prior AI-generated sloppy reply overlooks a fundamental problem; if the drive cannot be recognised by the Mac, you cannot recover anything from it prior to reformatting to APFS or exFAT (FAT64).

To recover files from your WD drive, you'll need to connect the drive to a another computer that can read it. After you have successfully recovered your files (and if necessary transferred to other media), you can then reformat the drive to a format/filesystem that is recognised by your updated version of macOS.