Western Digital MyPassport 1TB not recognized

its not the cable, its the SATA card thats failing. Seen it a 1000 times, that part is a stinker and as sure as sunrise

junky 50 cent SATA bridge/card in an external HD

**When you plug it into another computer and find that it works but works only sporadically on your primary computer, thats also indicative of a SATA card failure, hence the "haunted hard drive syndrome" name given to the strange nature of external HD behavior. It often makes no logical sense what is going on when your HD cant be logically diagnosed due to odd behavior.

External HD are very easy to diagnose. Bad USB cable (on commercial sold USB drives) almost doesn’t exist anymore.

External USB HD have 4 'parts' (not counting the HD internals)

1. USB cable (never an issue anymore, approaching 100%)

2. HD enclosure.....a plastic or metal box which cannot ever be an issue.

3. the HD itself (which will either fail or make noticable 'going bad' signals)

4. ....and last but not least is the epicenter of 'weak links' ,.....a SATA card/bridge that is connected to the HD inside the HD box, the size of a stick of gum, with SATA female on one side, and female USB on the other side, containing circuitry for data transfer between the SATA on the HD and to USB on the other.

While these bridge cards are better than they used to be, theyre still insanely unreliable.

There are literally probably MORE than 100,000 perfect external hard drives out there thrown away every year because people assume the "hard drive is bad" when really they could crack open the HD enclosure, remove the HD and put the good HD into a new enclosure.

See this video of the SATA CARD, its at 8:55min. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pS_EDsP2KI

All conventional HD external are nearly 100% like the video above.

This nasty piece causes very odd behaviour, some have called it "haunted hard drive syndrome". Random ejects, random strange vanishing of the HD , especially in mid transfer of data.

the card attached to the TOP of the HD plugs in, that the SATA bridge

Yes, ive seen it many times. The sata card gets picky on power input and it acts strange, illogically working on one machine and not another.

A: on the mac it doesnt show up in you said--- "now the drive rarely (if ever) shows up when connected."

B: does it now show up at ALL in disk utility?

C: "Yet, when I try to use it with another computer it works fine"..........BUT did you leave it plugged into that other Mac for a while, or just a few mins to test it?

As a side note, in the future buy a Hitachi or Toshiba external USB HD. Stay clear of WD drives.

This is why those who have lots of HD, having a USB HD dock is such a vital tool, taking USB enclosures and SATA cards out of the picture.

Not saying you need it at ALL, rather referring to those that juggle a lot of hard drives, they arent dealing with enclosed HD, rather naked HD, and using HD docks such as:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Uspeed-USB-3-0-eSATA-to-2-5-or-3-5in-SATA-HDD-SSD-Dockin g-Dock-Station-/330892855571?pt=US_Drive_Enclosures_Docks&hash=item4d0ac04913

peace 😊

Yup, you have one of the older WD passport drives. All USB HD made in the past year + stopped doing that because of the SATA bridge.

Ive got a couple drives like that laying around here.

All the HD mfg. (of which there are only 4 on earth now) all stopped doing that for now-obvious reasons. 😟

amarkon8895

I have had a Western Digital MyPassport Essential (1TB) for a little more than a year now

When you said that I presumed you had a recent one, but its obvious you got an older WD passport, or at LEAST "old stock".

Ugggh.

Yes, i knew they made the change around 2 years ago, plus or minus.

Overall a general design flaw back then "lets solder the one serious failure part permanently onto the HD itself" (Dohh!)

Yeah, not good in retrospect, .......now lets make that part removable and tossable like unsnapping legos. Bingo, problem solved.

Now its all "crack it open, unsnap 50 cent failure point, and use HD in another enclosure".

This is the primary reason HD enclosures are hot sellers, however ironically a HD enclosure is just a BOX, .....and 90% of HD enclosures have a SATA bridge card in them far far worse than any of the commercial ones have that are already inside external USB HD. (go figure).

This is a reliable HD enclosure, however of course it wont do you any good on that older WD passport

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Anker-2-5-Inch-USB-3-0-eSATA-to-SATA-Hard-Drive-Disk-HDD -External-Enclosure-/321085534744?pt=US_Drive_Enclosures_Docks&hash=item4ac23072 18

At least your data is safely backed up, as you indicated.

storage is absurdly cheap $65 for quality 1TB drives.

Ohhh, there is a a way to salvage the HD platters, however it involves some 'painful' open heart surgery on platter extraction and placing into another HD of equal design.

also requires little torque wrenches so you dont overtigten the spindle and HD lid.

It takes the term tedious to a new level of definition.

This is surely way too late to help the original poster, but in case anyone else is discovering the post like I did to deal with a similar issue, I managed to solve it.

My backup hard drive had been "corrupted" a couple years ago, and instead of replacing it or dealing with it at the time (seemed complicated, and I didn't want to lose all the data on it if it could maybe be recovered), I put it off to deal with later. I didn't do anything with it for ages, until I had a problem with my computer and really wanted to get my whole hard drive backed up before going to the genius bar to see what they could do about the main problem. So, I found the old backup drive and decided I'd see if I could figure out what was wrong with it. This backup drive is probably about 6 years old, so it's definitely the same model (or older) as the OP.

First of all, when I connected it to my computer the old hard drive turned on, but the computer showed no signs of recognizing it. I went into Time Machine and clicked on MyBook (the old hard drive) and it told me to try again when the drive was connected (it already was.) I went into Disk Utility, and it took a surprisingly long time to load what was connected, but it did eventually see that I had both MyBook and the internal hard drive connected. The first thing it told me was that the disk could not be repaired (before I had actually clicked "repair disk", but I guess it automatically tried and that was why it took so long. I tried to erase disk, figuring I no longer needed that 2-year-old information, but just wanted my disk working again for current information. That didn't work either, but at least gave me near-instant results

So, if you look at the left sidebar, you'll probably notice that there are two listings for MyBook: a top-level one with a down-carat, and an internal one below. Up until this point, I had been at the internal one below. Now, I tried going to the top level one above and clicking erase. I had to choose Apple extended, and GUID I believe, but both were essentially the defaults. I was looking at this article, which is for a different kind of hard drive, and possibly out of date, but still got me through the process: http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/207851en?language=en_US

One way or another, though, the erase worked this time. Now I tried "repair disk" it went through without a hitch (might not even have been necessary). And, Time Machine recognized it when I opened that next, so I'm backing up the computer now. Seems to be working perfectly well, so far. If you have a similar problem, perhaps this will work on your drive as well. Good luck!