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WD My Passport for Mac won't mount on my Mac Pro

My 1TB external hard drive is less than six months old and was working fine; now won't mount on my Mac. I don't remember disconnecting it without ejecting it but I do think I got a message about needing to eject before disconnecting. I checked in the forum for a possible solution and tried connecting it to a PC laptop; I could see it to eject it but it didn't show up anywhere else. I am not a computer expert! How can I access my files? I have a Mac Pro, Mac OS X ver. 10.6.8.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5)

Posted on Aug 8, 2014 3:12 AM

23 replies

Jan 3, 2016 3:06 PM in response to Dev Sebastian

Paragon's utility worked where Disk Utility failed, thanks for the info.

Jan 3, 2016 5:15 PM in response to Phyllis Ormsby

I will never again buy a WD product. The shelf life just seems too short.

Jan 4, 2016 4:00 PM in response to Rick Whitelaw

For me it is a problem with my Orico USB 3.0 card, after putting my Passport on my native 2.0 bus, all problems went away. Gonna have to get another card with Mac customer support.

Feb 7, 2016 10:26 AM in response to Dev Sebastian

When I installed the Paragon NTFS for Mac and restarted my macbook the WD Passport drive seemed to mount and appeared for just a moment after logging back in and then it disappeared. Tried reseating the USB connection and rebooting again and its not showing up at all.

Initially the drive mounted fine out of the box. First thing I did was reformat it in disk utility with the mac journaling and I did a full back up. When the backup was done I couldn't unmount the drive. I had also waited for the encryption feature to finish. From what I could tell everything was done but the macbook wouldn't eject it. So I just unplugged it. Now when I plug it in it won't mount but I do get a light on the drive. It stays solid for some number of minutes and then it goes to blinking. I've also tried using a USB hub with its own power and that made no difference. It shouldn't be a power problem if it was working before out of the box. So at the moment I don't know what to do. I just bought this thing, I did a full backup, and now it its useless.

Feb 7, 2016 11:29 AM in response to Sean Hockabout

Some of the third-party USB cards use up all their PCIe Bus power to run the logic on the card. They may require extra power input to be able to supply USB power to external devices.

Feb 7, 2016 11:37 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

The light on the drive turns on and I can feel/hear it humming and running.

Feb 7, 2016 2:00 PM in response to Unfinished_Symphony

That all may be true.

But I do not hear you saying it is rock-solid reliable on Bus Power.

Feb 7, 2016 2:30 PM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I don't understand. It worked out of the box one time. I did a full backup. Same cable, same computer, same drive lol. Why would something change with bus power?

When I did my backup I checked the option for using encryption, too. Someone else on the WD communities found that when applying encryption appeared to cause the problem considering that no encryption, all else being equal, was working.

WD My Passport for Mac won't mount on my Mac Pro