WD My Passport for Mac 1TB is unaccessible (Not Working!?)

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hi,

After coming back from holiday I went to use my WD Passport as I usually do for my University work. However when I plug this in via the USB port on my brand nee Macbook Pro it is not recognised whatsoever! (Not even in disk utility)

With my limited knowledge I took to the internet to do some research, and I then tried the Passport in my iMac where it is also not recognised, however this times it was recognised in disk utility. I verified this this using the button and it says “The partition map appears to be OK”. This leaves the “repair disk” button able to be clicked.

However I am useless and don’t want to make any mistakes so I was looking for some advice, I have only owned the passport for the best part of three months and it contains some work that I have not backed up and plenty of photos that I would not like to loose. (A lesson has been learnt already).

Please could someone advise me on the best way to gain access/fix my problem.

Thanks in advance!

2

Do you use this drive to exchange data from iMac and PC ?

Make sure you format the drive as exFAT and Master Boot Record (MBR) as partition scheme.

Windows is the main problem. It can’t recognize the GUID partition map if formatted with a Mac. If you format on a Windows PC, you’ll see two partitions. A very small one and a larger one. Usually the file ends up in the smaller one, so that will give issues with bigger files.

Apple and Microsoft have to fix this, but it has been like this for years.