Westen Digital My Passport Wont Show Up?

As formatted in exfat was it showing up at all in disk utility?

If it was working fine on your Mac for a while, then the problem is likely this:

Your dead external hard drive is likely fine! Great hope for your 'faulty' external HD

verify however on another machine other than your Mac, such as your PC, since in Exfat both PC and Mac can read/write to the drive.

Clarification: it works on NEITHER Mac or PC after the format?

DID IT work for a while on either AFTER the format?

If yes on both, then your SATA card in the HD case is likely kaput.

offload all data from it to your PC. Again, very likely the SATA card is failing.

plotinus.., it is very unlikely that it is the sata card. how do you come to that conclusion?

what os are you running, perry99?

i would like to mention that i have two western digital mypassport 2,5" each 2GB from 2010 and 2013, and since i installed 10.9 they will not mount in the finder and will not show up in apple´s hard disc utility (left column) or anywhere else.

the data on the discs is not important (they are empty), so i dont have an urgent problem to solve,

but this would mean, that it is no defective SATA controller or defective usb cable/port or defective apple computer, as i tested all available usb3.0 slots of my two brand new shipped macs:

- imac 27" late 2013

- macbook air 13 mid 2013

to be on the safe side, i requested a brand new mypassport at wd, shipping in advance (warranty) and sent the "old" one back. i ve been waiting 4 days, and it was here! wd support is perfect.

the brand new is the third one, i tested now, and it behaves like the ones before, wont show up anywhere.

i did NOT install any wd driver or tool before, but i considered it to help mount the drive, so i gave it a try and installed the latest wd turbo driver for mac, the wd security app and wd disc tools... nothing happened, no mount. even wd disc tools cannot reformat the discs, it shows up in the wd disc tool app with serial number, but it cannot be mounted or dismounted, so i got an error when i tried to format it with the wd disc tool app (could not format the disc because of an unknown problem)

lets hope this will be fixed with 10.9.1, 10.9.2 or any firmware update by wd soon !

thanks

there is no solution other than wait for 10.9.1 or 10.9.2 or a driver update from wd, in my opinion.

i wonder why it takes so long, the wd harddiscs and mypassport drives are very popular and widely spreaded throughout the world.

i also wonder, if we are the only ones who encounter that specific problem, i found some others at wd forums, and there are several topics here in this forum, but i am not sure what the rest of the world thinks?

thanks

Hi Everyone,

I am having a similar problem with my WD My Passport for Mac 2TB, it shows up in the "System Report" under USB, so it's being "seen" however it doesn' mount nor shows up in the Disk Utility. The drive does spin I can hear it and activity light is blinking as it always did, but as I said I can't see it in the Finder.

Looking at this forum and others I see that I kind of have two options:

1 - Go to a data recovery shop and pay them a lot of money to get my files off of the drive.

2 - Get another HD enclosure, so that I can plug this drive in to that and make it work.

For option #2, I don't think that'll work but I wanted to get your opinions on this. Basically this drive comes with its own circuit board (AKA controller interface) which seems impossible to remove, check here >> http://www.storagereview.com/2tb_western_digital_my_passport_portable_hard_drive _review >> towards the middle of the page where it shows and explains the internal setup of the drive. It says "...this one integrates the USB 3.0 controller with the circuit board of the drive, allowing for fewer internal components and circuitry. It also prevents us from popping the drive outside of this enclosure and using it inside another device as a SATA notebook hard drive." When I opened up the enclosure I saw that this is correct, as it is shown in the photos here.

PlotinusVeritas, you suggested getting this enclosure for someone here >> 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 >> however due to the "integrated" setup of this WD drive there is no way that I can use with another enclosure, correct? This is the conclusion I've reached but as I said I wanted to get second opinions before spending a lot of money for a data recovery service.

Thoughts?

Thanks everyone!

i appreciate for pointing out the update onto 10.9.1..

i was about to lose my mind coz i know im not going crazy and my WD was in fact working on my MacPro before.... but eversince i have updated mine to the latest 10.9, it does show on the disk Utility but its NOT loading at all, nor showing on my Computer... *sighs* did it cost you money for the new WD peppermint (sorry if that sounded like a silly question) when they sent it to you or they upgraded the new one for free for you so its compatible with the 10.9?

wish i could revert back to the old version on my Pro so i wouldnt have to deal with this problem 😟

thanks!

Update on my situation (perhaps this'll be helpful to some): I've concluded that the controller board is "broken" after taking it to IT professional friend of mine. We took the board off the hard drive (so it is actually removable).

I found an identical board online and the same place will swap the BIOS chip also. I see this as a "worth a try" solution since data recovery people are giving me an estimate a lot higher than the controller board swap, which will cost about $50.

If anyone is interested in further details please ask.

anubisBrooklyn wrote:

however due to the "integrated" setup of this WD drive there is no way that I can use with another enclosure, correct?

Correct, thats the pitfall of some WD drives with integrated SATA card on the controller board.

This cost saving measure is very unfortunate on their part in doing same, it prevents easy cheap data recovery. 😟

Yet another reason to avoid consumer level WD drives.

Mcigucci

Peppermints indications are incorrect, 10.9 was a failure on WD part, of which they (western digital) admitted FAULT about a month ago on same.

I assume youre using WD software or RAID, ......remove same, never ever use bundled HD software.

A normal working WD drive has no issues with Mavericks UNLESS:

1. The HD or a SATA card has failed / failing

2. you installed the WD smartware, WD software package, or RAID..........of which WD admitted fault on same with its Software.

anubisBrooklyn Brooklyn

This is the extreme hazard of not having MANY redundant external HD archives, ..all HD are poised to fail and miserably so for any user.

Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection

I'd love to know more about how you solved this problem. I also have a 2 TB My passport drive for mac that suddenly stopped working. Not recognized in my disk utility, but is listed under system reports>USB. When plugged in, there is just a white light blinking. Would love to get more info from you on how you fixed the drive so it could be recognized? thank you