MY PASSPORT WD Drive not showing on my macbook but shows on others.

Thats the final piece. (and you swapped out HD USB cables too on the "bad" HD?).

After swapping cables between the "2 identical WD USB HD", you have (nearly 100% certainty) a bad SATA card as I stated much earlier.

The case being, your other Macs will read/ write to this HD fine, but this one Mac wont. It makes very little logical sense to most (for obvious reasons), but that that one Mac is no longer able to communicate with said HD due to the SATA card.

.......This is why some of us HD 'collectors' call this the "haunted HD syndrome" 😐, where a HD acts utterly illogical and contrary to common sense diagnostics (works fine on ONE Mac but not another)

You have 2 options, offload all data onto another HD that will work on that one Mac, OR crack open the HD case and remove the HD itself and put into another enclosure ($10-15$ ebay).

A SATA card is about the size of a stick of gum, its plugged into the HD with a female USB connection on the other side, it unplugs in 1/2 a second from the HD once you get into the HD casing. Its a (junky) 50 cent part.

If a HD is over 3 months old (most all "bad" HD fail usually before the 3 month mark) and LESS THAN 5 years old and treated very well, ....people that assume a non-working HD is a "bad" HD when in fact the HD is just 100% fine, its just that miserable little circuit card. 😟

Hi,
I have a MBP mid-2010 13", core2duo one.

Mine is WD 1TB My passport(not being detected on any computer, but light glows, it sound head running on the platter.(it makes deected sound on windows-pc and says installing software, but drive doens't show up in disk neither disk management nor explorer), same with mac, it lights, can hear sound from HD but dowsn't show up in disk utility nor the desktop/finder.

Besides, i have a samsung 2.5 HD with "

Vantec NexStar TX 2.5-Inch SATA to USB 2.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure".

and a Hitachi signature mini 500GB(7 yrs old and still working in windows and on mac).

and this WD deosn't get recognized on 2 diff MBP,Air and a windows PC.

Can you plese help me out..!

cj2600!

I don't know what the heck is wirewire or PRAM, all I know is I was freaking out, because my backup wasn't working, and thanks to you taking your time and posting this reply, I got an immediate solving of my problem, thanks!!!!!

radoja, I know your original post was 2013 but, for anyone else stumbling across this searching for a solution themselves, I have found in the past that if I enter Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility > select the drive in question (WD my passport) and check

A) That all partitions are mounted (select partition and use "Mount" option)

B) Select the drive (not any single partition) and try First Aid > Verifiy Disk or

C) Select the drive in question (not any single partition) and try First Aid > Repair Disk then finally

D) Select the drive in question (not any single partition) and select the Eject option.

This has work in the past for me but only now all these options are still seeming to fail. Booooo! Hope this helps someone else at some point. I am going to keep trawling for a solution for me... :-(

Hi!

I have the same problem. I have an old MacBook Intel Core 2 Duo, OS X 10.7.5 and WD Passport works without fail.

I tried 10 other MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, Mac mini…. all of them installed OS 10.9.x or 10.10.

The WD Passport never mounted to the desktop on USB 3 port.

It never seemed in the Disk Utility.

But!

If I tried to disconnect USB cable - any cable, I tried more - very very slowly, then the disk became MOUNTED on desktop! (Pull out USB plug one third part!)

And it doesn't matter how it'was formatted. The format and the partition table was irrelevant. Slow disconnecting movement always worked on all machines.

You can try it too.

If it's working, then It's a very fine joke.

Ridiculous insufficiency in cooperation of Apple and WD.

Thank you so much! I was having issues with me HD too and this saved me!

Boogshee, thank you for your post and the slowly plugging the USB cable and only two thirds the way in solved the problem. I can now use the disk again with my Mac Book Air.

Hi, i had the same problem with my WD My Passport on my MacBook Pro retina, on my previous MacBook Pro 17 it was all fine.

I resolved this problem by installing WD drivers. You can download the WD Macintosh + TURBO Drivers here: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=207&sid=108&lang=en

Regards 😉

Boogshee, as unbelievable is it is, your method totally solved my problem. Very slow removal/insertion of the USB triggered my MacBook Air into recognizing my WD Passport. Completely ludicrous situation, very grateful that you discovered this bizarre method. Thank you!

For me a disk repair solved the problem.

On a mac:

Utilities>Disk Utility :

Click on the disk to repair,

Go to the repair tab

Click repair: it will take a while.. be patient.

This proces fixed the boot file on the disk and it worked again.

Good luck

Can't believed this worked. Will be connecting and erasing hard drive and bringing this pile of xxxx back.

Boogshee, wow, you're a magician! I inserted my WDPassport's USB connector very slowly and voila it showed up on my MBP on which it wasn't showing!! Cheers sir!!

Boogshee I love you man! Been searching for days! What a joke by Apple and WD!

Boogshee, Thanks!. Same problem. After multiple restarts of the computer, removing and reinserting the USP cable > 5 times all without success, slowly disconnecting the USP cable from the computer, and slowly reinserting the connector resulted in the drive showing in Finder. A successful back-up is in progress!