WD External drive won't mount

Holy smokes - it worked for me too! Deleting the "fsk_hfs" in the activity monitor did the trick.

Good grief... what even made you think of killing that process???

Whatever it was, I'm grateful.

Am copying stuff of a failed external WD Elements that's been serving as my Time Machine drive for a year and a half now, after perviously not having been able to even mount it.

Whacky attempt on your part? Good thing you found this.

Thank you!

I just read every post on this after my WD 1TB failed to be read or unmount, I rebooted the iMac and it no longer even showed; I noticed that it hadn't backed up to time machine for the past 2 weeks either. I unplugged the USB etc, looked at activity monitor and was just about to give up.

I unplugged the USB and the power cord, left for 30s, plugged back in and its back to normal.

this drove me crazy for over a year. issue for me was that on mid-2009 macbook pro usb 2.0 ports were not working with the usb 3.0 connections on the hard drives. everything worked fine on my daughter's 2013 macbook air. upgraded machine (for reasons other than this) and everything has worked perfectly for a month. still have spotlight (off) and hard drive sleep settings (don't allow) per the recommendations of others in the thread. expensive solution but maybe check the usb connections on your mac if nothing else is working.

Thank you! Quitting the process fsck.hfs made my external drive usable again; however, it is now read-only. I have used Disk Utility to repair and verify the disk and both were successful.

I have 855 GB of Time Machine backups on this drive and I have less than 100 GB free on my computer, so copying it to my computer and reformatting the external drive is out of the question. Is there a permission I can change somewhere to make the disk writeable again? Or do I need to spring for another external drive?

Terminal usage & commands can be dangerous, but...

sudo chflags 0 "/Volumes/External backup disc"

sudo chmod a+rx "/Volumes/External backup disc"

Might work.

I'd get a second Disk anyway for safety.

BDAqua, your post scared me off a little. I suddenly was inspired to unmount the external drive in Disk Utility and the mount it. I'm overjoyed to report that all is well! My computer just performed a successful backup.

Good work, thanks for the report! 🙂

This worked for external Seagate - thanks!

Great, thanks for the reply! 🙂

I saw a very similar process - in my case it was fsck_msdos which appeared. I force quit the process and the same thing - got a message saying I can't save to it but I can read it. Whew. Thank you ! Something too easily messes up especially older generation WD drives. In my case, I had plugged 2 drives into my Thunderbolt connected monitor. It has some automatic stupid software on it that "energy saver" turns it off automatically (even if you are using it!!) after a certain number of hours. This coincided with copying data onto one of the 2 drives. But both drives are toast and no longer recognised. One of them at least I could see on Disk Utility but it wouldn't mount - this is the one that I can now see. The other one seems much worse off. Luckily I have a back up of that one that is more recent than the back up of the one that I am now able to recover fully. I have no idea why Macs are so bad at dealing with external devices, and that PCs can still see these. It drives me mad.

BDAqua, first of all, thank you for your patience in this topic. I also have a My passport 1TB drive formatted in ExFat. But now the drive won't mount anymore. I tried to delete the process fsck_exfat and now mac can see the drive. But it only shows the main folder. When i try to open it, to access the files, or copy to the desktop, it keeps loading (or stuck in "preparing for copy") forever, and then, Finder stop responding. I also cannot repair/eject the disk because it says "the disk can't be unmounted", then i have to pull the usb cable to turn off or to finder start working again.

When i try to open in windows. It sees the drive and i can see every file, but it also kill explorer.. Just to note that I've tried to connect in different machines and my mac has more space than the files (around 200Gb) in the drive. Do you have any suggestion??

Thank you very much

Extra info:

• Disk Identifier : disk2s1
• 
  Mount Point : Unmounting…
• 
  File System : ExFAT
• 
  Connection Bus : USB
• Device Tree : IODeviceTree:/PCI0@0/XHC1@14
• Writable : No
• Universal Unique Identifier : 00CF8798-9BE7-34B0-8DF4-41723D5BCA74
• Capacity : 1 TB (1,000,170,585,088 Bytes)
• Free Space : 763.41 GB (763,413,528,576 Bytes)
• Used : 236.72 GB (236,724,420,608 Bytes)
• Number of Files : 1,806,064
• Number of Folders : 0

Hi,

Have you tried Repairing the Disk on the PC?

Tough to tell at this point if it's Disk Corruption or hardware failing.

This worked like a charm! I can atleast make a backup now!

WORKED!! Thank you!!!