External USB Hard Drive not showing up, after Yosemite update

Tilly111 wrote:

I fixed mine by connecting my seagate external hd into a windows machine and deleted the partition. The moment I connected it back into my MacBook Pro 15" Yosemite it was recognised. I deleted, reformatted and it worked. Whew!

Well, you got yourself the equivalent of a brand-new Seagate external HD, but at what price! You lost all the old contents of the drive, and now have an HFS+ (i.e. Apple) formatted drive, which is, at best, read-only under Windows with additional software. Not a good tool for copying photos or other stuff between two machines.

Interesting posts, so i made tests about this problem and my conclusion is we can consider it's a very important bug in os x computers.

Tests with usb3 Western digital my passport 1to / macbook pro / os x 10.10.2 and 10.10.3 beta 1

1. format to exfat

2. connect usb disk to a macbook pro.

3. success : partition is mounted

4. copy 200Go of data (many files).

5. disconnect usb disk and reconnect it

6. Failed : impossible to mount the partition. USB disk displayed in disk utility. Same result in another usb port.

7. Connect USB disk to PC / Windows 8.1

8. Success : USB disk is recognized

9. format the USB disk to exfat

10. Connect usb disk to macbook pro

11. Success

So i do another test :

1. create two partitions P1 and P2 and format them to exfat

2. copy only 30Go of data to P2

3. connect usb disk to macbook and please to wait 😉

4. P1 is mounted. P2 is mounted after a long time (several minutes).

delay to mount seems depend of number of files. There are posts about spotlight wich is responsible for the problem.

I think it's an important bug. When a user connect a usb disk, the disk must be mount in a matter of seconds.

This bug or feature exist for a long time. Hope Apple make answer about this strange subject.

Today, impossible to work with external drives / apple computers.

Hi

I recently upgrade my mac book pro system.

I am currently using os x Yosemite version 10.10.2.

After the upgrade, my external hard drive doesn't show up

I checked on the finder and disk utility and now is there. what can i do ?

I'm posting in case it helps anyone else with a problem similar to what I had with WD My Passport 1TB external drive...

One day it was no longer on my desktop. There was power to the drive, the light was on, it felt like the disk was spinning, but it did not show up on my desktop, nor in Disk Utilities. After searching the web for awhile, one site mentioned plugging it into another computer. I did this with my work laptop (PC) and it was not found there either. Based on that result and other troubleshooting surfing, another site suggested it could be a bad cable. For what its worth, My Passport has been sitting in the same spot near my iMac for 2 years, it does not move around at all. So I went on Amazon, bought their "Amazon Basics" brand cable for just over $5 (certainly worth a try rather than lose all my data), plugged it in and lo and behold My Passport appeared on my desktop. I would not have believed a cable could go bad when it just sits there, but that's what the problem was.

new iMac 5k had same problem, external WD 2TB drive not seen by system report, disk utilities, etc. on the mac. Here's what I did, seems to be working (don't know if all of this is necessary):

1. disconnected all USB except the keyboard and the drive (track pad is on blue tooth).

2. plugged the drive into the USB slot the keyboard was in, plugged in the keyboard to another USB slot.

3. rebooted, still not seen

4. leaving usb plugged into the mac, removed power from the external drive.

5. restored power to the drive

Now the iMac sees the drive. I've reconnected all of the other USB devices, ejected and remounted the drive 6 times, rebooted a few times. Still showing up.

Lew

Hi everyone,

Two months ago I bought a new Retina MBP with Yosemite already installed, and the 2TB My Passport which I had been using with my old 2010 MBP would no longer show up in Yosemite. However….I have solved the problem - I noted that my new MBP has USB 3.0 port/cable and my old MBP with Snow Leopard (with which 2TB My Passport worked perfectly), has USB 2.0 ports. SO I bought a USB 2.0 hub and voila!! It now works perfectly every time on my new MBP with Yosemite. In fact it works better and faster than it did with the old laptop.

The USB hub I bought is:

Premium 4 Port USB 2.0 Aluminium USB hub for iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air..................hope this helps

Hello,

I'm really hoping someone can help me. I am having the same issues, but in case there is something I did different, I'm going to briefly go through what is going on with my WD Passport.

I've had this external HD for about a year and a half (maybe a little more, but less than 2 years). It has been working fine since the day I started using it. I use it with my Macbook Air 13 inch (mid 2013). About 4 months ago I updated to Yosemite and I am currently running it. When I updated, the hard drive worked normally, so it wasn't that it seems. One thing might be an issue, I used it to copy files over to my iMac, which is not running Yosemite, once I did that, I put the hard drive in my case and traveled to Japan, where I am currently. I hadn't plugged it in to my Air since then. Suddenly last night when I decided to open my midterm to work on it from my HD, I received the error: The disk you inserted is not supported, with the 3 options "initialize, ignore, eject". The light on my HD was blinking and humming. It will not mount, I cannot see it in finder no matter how I manipulate it.

I decided to eject, restart and plug it in again. The same error message popped up. So I hit initialize and it brought me to disk utility. My HD shows up as disk2s10, which is not what I had named it. I hit verify and after that failed I clicked Repair as it told me to. This is the history from repair disk:

Verifying volume “disk2s10”Verifying file system.Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.The volume could not be verified completely.File system check exit code is 8.Error: This disk needs to be repaired. Click Repair Disk.

Verify and Repair volume “disk2s10”Repairing file system.Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.The volume could not be verified completely.File system check exit code is 8.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.

Here I am now, worried that I have lost vital information. I am kind of in a jam right now and can't see if it works on other computers, or even my iMac back home. I will not be able to see if it works on my iMac any time soon either. I also downloaded the extremely useless disk utility from the WD website and it said there was an error, giving me ZERO options to fix/ troubleshoot the problem. It didn't even identify what was wrong, it just said diagnostics failed or whatever and I deleted the program out of sheer rage. I also attempted to update the firmware, which it said it did successfully, but did nothing. I've rebooted several times with it connected and disconnected and nothing is working. I really hope someone can help because I am screwed if I cannot recover my files.

Thanks in advance.

Dear AN8425,

A sad story, and it sounds like you are in real trouble. Not much advice from this end, I am afraid, because it sounds as if your drive might indeed be seriously damaged. I had this before and had to retire the disks involved.

It is sometimes possible to mount the volume in spite of the errors, using the "Mount" tab in Disk Utility (which is under Go -> Utilities in the Finder). In my case, I could thus recover the data I needed, and could subsequently use the zeroing-out option under Disk Utility's "Erase" tab to recover the disk (which for a 1TB disk on USB2 may well take a couple of days). (Note for geeks: it appears that the "write zeroes to disk" option actually rebuilds a disk's bad-block list. The disk may in the end have a few hundred megabytes less space, but will work again - at least until more bad blocks develop!)

Your case sounds different than most others reported here, in that (a) your disk volume was correctly recognised as Journalled HFS+, and (b) that there was no involvement of USB3. That's why I guess that your drive may actually have developed too many bad blocks and the file system structure is damaged. Professionals can probably recover it anyway (the FBI certainly can!), but until you tried it on other computers, don't do too much with it or the problem may only get worse.

By the way, assuming your drive is in fact named "disk2s10", the following command from the terminal command line,

sudo dd bs=1m if=/dev/disk2s10 of=/dev/null

will try to read the entire disk byte-for-byte and then throw away the data. If the disk is bad, it will sooner or later produce the diagnostic "Input/Output Error" and stop, telling you how far into the drive it got until it ran into trouble. If the disk is good, the final diagnostic will tell you how many 1 MB blocks were read (1 MB = 1024*1024 bytes) and discarded. That should be the actual size of the disk or volume you dumped. ("dd" stands for "disk dump" - an ancient UNIX command.)

This is obviously an ongoing issue and I wish I had seen all this stuff before buying a new Mac and having Yosemite wipe my hard drives.

I have 5 western digital external hard drives. Three are My Book Duo's - raided to secure the data. One is a stand alone 1 TB mybook drive - all Mac formatted. I plugged in a USB 3 TB drive (NTFS formatted) and it showed up as Mybook instead of the name I used. Weird. I unplugged it and plugged into another Computer - it was empty. I tried lots of things and eventually reformatted and then used a data recovery program to get back about 50% of the data. Last night I fired up the Mac Mini with all the drives attached - firewire 800 daisy chained and using a thunderbolt to firewire adapter cable. Two of the drives had changed names and were blank. ***!? I unplugged everything and one by one plugged in the firewire drives. three are back and visible although the raid seems to fol disk utility. One drive, a 2TB raided mybook duo is not back and shows as empty. It mounts but has changed name and is no longer showing any files. This is complete b*@$%##@ apple. How can plugging in a drive that has worked for years on my Macbook pro suddenly result in it being wiped by the OS?!

Same problem, the HD wasnt even mounting, now my hardrive wont even turn on... Yosemite broke my 2TB WD harddrive.. I should get £200 back from apple. its one of the most popular harddrives how can apple be so stupid. so now i have to buy a new harddrive and a perfectly good WD harddrive is gonna be thrown away.. THANKS APPLE. hope people read this and let the world see how much you dont give a **** about your customers,, still no fix... on a problem with so many complaints.. rediculous

I have been facing the same issue since my update. I tried something and it worked I installed PARAGON NTFS FOR MAC off of download.com and I was able to access my hard drive after, and here is the link for it

http://download.cnet.com/Paragon-NTFS-for-Mac/3000-2248_4-75300588.html

I *think* I may have found the root cause of *my* problems with Yosemite 10.10.2 not reliably mounting my iPod Shuffle and the two "external devices" in my Garmin GPS. Previously I had mentioned that when these devices successfully mounted, that Disk Utility showed them as filesystem type MS_DOS (FAT32). When they did NOT mount successfully, Disk Utility showed them as filesystem type ZFS Filesystem. It took a couple days after noticing that to realize/remember that a year or so ago, when I was still running Snow Leopard, I had done a little bit of playing around trying to get the ZFS file system code to compile and run. But I had long ago (I thought) uninstalled it all as I was unable to get it to build successfully and run. But the fact that Disk Utility identified those external USB2 devices as "ZFS Filesystem" made me wonder if there was a ZFS kernel extension still on the machine that was getting loaded and confusing the Yosemite 10.10.2 disk subsystem. Sure enough, when I looked in the /Library/Extensions subdirectory/folder, there was a ZFS kernel extension file still there. So I deleted it, and for good measure, re-ran the ZFS uninstaller. That was about 10-14 days ago and I have not yet (knock on wood!) had any further problems getting the iPod Shuffle and the Garmin GPS external "drives" to mount correctly.

This makes me wonder about the "exFat" file system that Msohni reported that Disk Utility was reporting his external USB drive to be. I'm pretty sure I've never seen anything mount as an "exFat" file system. I have seen many devices (mostly flash memory devices like USB memory sticks and such) mount as MS-DOS (FAT32) filesystem. So I wonder where the exFat filesystem comes from. Is it perhaps an NTFS filesystem kernel extension? If so, the fact that my problems seem to have been cleared up by removing the ZFS kernel extension from the /Library/Extensions folder makes me think that some third-party kernel extensions just don't play nice with Yosemite. In my case the ZFS kernel extension that was on my computers pre-dated the release of Yosemite 10.10.0, so it wouldn't surprise me if the root cause of some of our problems may be the presence of kernel extensions that need to be updated to play nice with Yosemite. YMMV, of course. ;-)

BTW, if my theory about out-of-date kernel extensions not playing nice with Yosemite is correct, it would explain why doing a wipe-and-clean install of Yosemite instead of just updating over a previous version of OS X (like I did, over Snow Leopard) prevents these kinds of things from happening.

Hi,

I think you are really on to something here.

In my case, it wasn't that I had upgraded to Yosemite, because this particular brand-new computer came pre-installed with it, BUT:

Not being happy about only having read-only access to some NTFS-formatted external drives, I had installed OSXFUSE and then NTFS-3G to get proper, albeit not Apple-supported, NTFS support. That works fine for NTFS-drives, which I can now mount read-write. But if what you are saying is at the bottom of our problems, it may well be that NTFS-3G also added support for exFAT (which I think is an improved version of FAT32 introduced with Windows NT, supporting a much wider file name space with long file names and upper-lower case distinction in file names). It sounds like Yosemite gets confused if these bits are part of the kernel. Because, of course, none of this stuff is "officially supported", and Apple is - as we know - now playing a much more hard-ball version of the not-invented-here game; far worse than Microsoft did in its most arrogant days in the mid-nineties.

Here is an excerpt from my notebook: Download NTFS-3G. Trying to install fails with security message. Go to System Preferences -> Security & Privacy -> General and click on "Open Anyway".

So, it could be that indeed something got broken by this non-Apple install. Thanks for all the effort you put into your research!

Martin

The same thing has happened to me. WD 1 terabyte is NOT showing up. But I have been able to open the drive fine on a friend's older mac pro running a previous OS with no loss of data. This is clearly an issue with Yosemite and not the drive itself. This has been incredibly frustrating.