Wd elements mac not recognized

It says that it detected an error and had the option of automatically fixing it. I clicked "Start" and let it ran, but it didn't have a progress bar and just had a "Cancel" button. After running for minutes, my mom came in and unplugged the external hard drive forcefully I yelled at her for doing that. We tried plugging it into the Windows laptop again, and my files and photos could be read!!

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But it still can't be read on Mac and has the flashing problem. I'm asking because I have had accidentally unplugged other WD external hard drives without ejecting in the past while not writing data, like in this case, but the drives never broke. What is up in this case? I'm curious if this is something that happens a lot or if it's just a less durable hard drive I got. Because I'm at a point where WD's warranty can give me a new drive to replace it, or I can fix this drive myself. I have copied the photos out to a new drive on a Windows machine.

Because if it is something that happens with the same frequency in all drives, shouldn't I just fix it?


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What is the best free software program on Windows that might potentially fix my problem? Mac programs are good too if they can actually access it since my Mac can't even mount it. It seems it was fixed for you when you let the check complete A quick way to "fix" this is to manually force quit the fsck process from activity monitor.

Plug in the drive, right click the drive in Explorer, select Properties, and then in the Tools tab you'll find "Error-checking". Click "Check Now" and let it scan the whole drive fixing any errors it finds. As you have backed up the photos on the windows machine, you should try to use disk utility to fix your drive. There might be a volume mounting error or a format error, which can be fixed by using a function in disk utility called "first aid".

On your Mac, spotlight search for disk utility. It should show up. When it opens you should see a column on the left with all your disks listed there.

Mac can’t read WD Elements external drive (Solved) | Mac Data Recovery Blog

As you can see, this column has both internal and external drives listed there. Be extremely careful, do not tamper with the internal drives. Go over the list very carefully and select your external drive. It should be fairly obvious which one it is. In your case it should be labeled as something similar to WD passport ultra. If not, you can look at the storage capacity and check if it matches with your disk's here, 4TB. Next you need to run first aid. A self explanatory button placed towards the start of the row on the top says first aid.

Click and let the magic happen! If it doesn't start right away, you may have a different version of macOS. In the case of this, click on verify the disk. Next, click on repair. While doing this, please make sure no one yanks the cable out because that will be very, very bad. You could also try reformatting the disk, the steps for which I can edit in later. But it didn't work.

I unplugged the WD external, shut down my macbook pro, restarted it again,ran First Aid on Mac's Disk Utility again and finally it worked! Next, click on repair. While doing this, please make sure no one yanks the cable out because that will be very, very bad. You could also try reformatting the disk, the steps for which I can edit in later. But it didn't work. I unplugged the WD external, shut down my macbook pro, restarted it again,ran First Aid on Mac's Disk Utility again and finally it worked!

It took about min and my hard drive showed again :.

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I tried all the above, stressed for one afternoon, and then, from disk utility, clicked on the blue eject button on the top of the dialog box. Didn't ejected, but when I clicked then on the unmount and mount button. It mounted and appeared in my finder! I had the same issue and went to the disc utility and did pretty much what Haroon, above, did-clicked on the eject button.

It said it could not eject because the files were being used, so I tried repair and it looked like everything was fine, so I hit eject again and it still wouldn't unmount. I then went out of disc utility. It still wasn't there in finder, but when I pulled out the USB and put it back in-there it was!! And you have ruled out damaged drive and cable.

WD Elements hard drive suddenly not recognised by Macbook Air

The next step you should try is using Terminal. Find the Name of your External Hard Drive, it should show up here if it is not damaged. Example "Productivity", "Universal" etc. If name is Universal, Type diskutil mount Universal , press enter instead of typing the name of the drive, you can also type in the identifier, eg.

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    Mac can’t read WD Elements external drive (Solved)

    How can I test what is broken? Melissa Melissa 1 1 gold badge 1 1 silver badge 9 9 bronze badges. What do you get when you plug in the WD disk and issue the command diskutil list in Terminal? Please check out the answer here - apple. Or ex Fat? It is in exFat. You can try the following solution.

    Pratik Pratik 2, 1 1 gold badge 9 9 silver badges 24 24 bronze badges. A good idea would be to run the disk check in Windows to completion. Will it damage or change any photos? Professional server partition software for Windows Server system. Todo Backup Workstation. Small business backup solution to protect your PC, laptop or workstation from disaster. Windows server, exchange and SQL Server backup solution to ensure business continuity.

    Need easy iPhone data transfer software? Disk Copy Pro. Download for PC Download for Mac. Quick Fixes WD external hard drive light on but not recognized Here you have three options to quickly fix, and repair WD external hard drive with the "light on but not recognized" error: 1. Uncheck Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power. Advanced Fixes WD external hard drive light on but not recognized To fix a "WD external hard drive not detected, recognized or not working but light on" issue without losing any data, please don't format your drive and follow these steps to solve your problem: 1.

    Change drive letter to make WD external hard drive show up 1.