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Need help with WD My Passport for Mac

Hello all,


I have a WD My Passport for Mac in 1TB and I believe it is USB 2.0. I am trying to use it on a Macbook Pro Retina 2015. Its about 2-3 years old.


Last night I updated it with everything from my designs, and projects and tried to do all my music. I have 14k songs and stopped it when I realized it was not loading after a few hours. I just plugged it out without ejecting. Today, I'm trying to use it and it will not mount. It works. The light on the front flashes rapidly when I first plug it in and I can feel the hard drive moving. It then slows and the light stops flashing all together. Now, I'm at a very steady flash but still no mounting. It does not show up in Disk Utility. If anyone knows what I should do to be able to see the drive, or to get the items off the drive, please let me know.


I cannot reformat because you need to see the drive to do that and this was my way to back up things from smaller thumb drives which were full because of the items. Please help. Should I just plug it in and wait? My thumb drives work fine in both USB slots. I also tried to use the external hard drive on a Macbook Air and it did not mount there either. Any tips would be helpful.

MacBook Pro with Retina display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.4), WD My Passport for Mac External

Posted on May 8, 2016 7:21 AM

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May 8, 2016 6:12 PM in response to KimUserName

User uploaded fileHi Again,


I'm not allowed to select that. I see the option for Diagnostics Tool. Quick Test and Complete Test. None of the all able to be chosen. I click and nothing happens at all. When I right click on the top, it says No Volumes Found


User uploaded file

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May 8, 2016 10:55 PM in response to Asilaj

Asilaj wrote:


I cannot erase my drive because I have my full portfolio in there. I'm a Master's Student and still in the course. I can't erase 7 months of work and files then to fail.

You mean it was the only copy? That's not a backup. A backup has to be a duplicate copy so that if either drive fails, you still have one copy.


As said, you may want to try Data Rescue. You can download the app and see whether it will produce any results before you purchase it.

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May 8, 2016 11:08 PM in response to Asilaj

If it is in FAT32 format, that implies MBR partitioning. Both are fragile by default. The "No volumes found" would indicate that the partition table got trashed and will require something quite more powerful than what Disk Utility can offer. MBR/FAT32 is a Windows-native format, so you can try with all the Windows recovery tools available.


Good luck.


I have two 2TB units. Since I was only going to use them on my Macs from the start, first thing out of the box was to reformat in GUID/Apple Extended-Journaled.

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Need help with WD My Passport for Mac

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