Brand New ExFat Formatted WD My Book Duo (16 Tb- 2 x 8 TB) will not mount on late 2012 MacBook Pro Retina running OS Sierra (version 10.12.2). The Drive appears in the following locations: System ReportUSB and Disk Utilities (where it is grey) but will not mount. Clicking the Mount icon in Disk Utilities would not mount it. Hi all, I've got an infuriating problems with an older WD mybook studio II external drive. It's shows in disk utility but not in finder, and won't mount in DU. I found a thread suggesting that if fschk shows up in activity monitor, then force quit that process, but the process doesn't show when.

I have a 1 TB WD external HD that won't mount. I connect it via firewire to my MacBook Pro running OS 10.13 High Sierra. My mac sees the drive, it just won't mount. I've also tried to mount it via USB, but again, my system sees the drive, but won't mount it. Does anyone have any suggestion what I can do?

Generally, when you connect an WD, Seagate, Toshiba, Samsung external hard drive to Mac, it will be automatically mounted, then you can perform read and write operation on it. Alternatively, you can also select the disk and click on Mount to make it accessible by the operating system using Disk Utility.

However, hard drive problems may happen that your WD external hard drive won't mount on Mac, usually when you desperately need to access some data stored on it. Remain calm, all data on WD external hard drive is still there. This article will explain how to fix WD My Passport not mounting/showing up/recognized/detected.

WD external hard drive won't mount on Mac, how to fix?

First of all, if your WD external hard drive is listed on the left-hand-side menu of Disk Utility, you can make sure it doesn't have any hardware problem. Why the WD external hard drive won't mount? It is because the file system of the disk has been corrupted, preventing the disk from being accessible on Mac. Just try these solutions below.

Solution 1: Run Disk Utility to repair the WD external hard drive

No matter what problems you are meeting on a disk, First Aid is your first choice to repair it.

Step 1: Launch Disk Utility.

Step 2: Choose theunmountable WD external hard drive.

Step 3: Select First Aid in the top center and click Run.

Solution 2: Reformat to fix WD My Passport not mounting

If Sometimes, the Disk Utility may not function as desired. In this situation, the only solution is to reformat the WD external hard drive. But reformatting will remove all data on the disk. In order to avoid data loss, you have to recover lost data from unmountable external hard drive as soon as possible.

Step 1: Recover lost data from unmountable WD external hard drive on Mac

As the best free Mac data recovery, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is able to recover lost data from unmountable, unreadable, corrupted, inaccessible external hard drive, hard drive, USB flash drive, SD card, memory card, etc. It supports to recover documents, photos, music files, videos, emails on Big Sur 11/macOS Catalina 10.15/Mojave 10.14/High Sierra 10.13/Sierra 10.12/10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7.

1. Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on Mac.

2. Launch this program. Select the unmountable WD external hard drive and click 'Next'. The program will start scanning this drive for recoverable files.

3. After the scanning process finishes, you can click the found files and preview.

4. Choose what you want to get back and click 'Recover'.

5. Go through the recovered files and make sure all desired files are back.

Step 2: Fix WD external hard drive not mounting/showing up/recognized/detected on Mac by reformatting

1. Go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.

2. Select the unmountable WD external hard drive and click 'Erase' on the top.

3. Provide a name and a format to erase the drive.

4. When finished, you can mount your WD external hard drive on Mac and use it again.

Also read: Other ways to erase external hard drive on Mac

Hope this tutorial can help to fix WD external hard drive not mounting/showing up/recognized/detected on Mac. If your WD external hard drive not recognized on Windows, it is also easy to be fixed. If you have any question, please feel free to contact us.

Also read: Can't See External hard drive showing up on Mac, What to do?

Still have questions?

Summary: This post introduces 5 solutions you can try when you are unable to mount an external hard drive on your Mac. Also, to avoid further data loss, you can use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover lost data from this unmountable external drive first.

After you connect an external hard drive to your Mac, if everything is working fine, the operating system will automatically recognize, read, and mount your external drive, as well as show it in the Finder and on the desktop.

However, if your disk gives up the ghost just like the users below, the external disk will not be showing up as normal. And if you check it in the Disk Utility, you will find your drive unmounted there. Honda gx31 shop manual transmissions.

'I was able to use my 3 TB external hard disk drive to backup my data last week. But now it doesn't mount after I migrate from Mojave to macOS Catalina. I dug around and tried a lot of stuff but still can't mount this external hard drive on my Mac. Can someone explain how to get this drive mounted so I don't lose the data?'

Why an external drive is not mounting on Mac?

There are numerous reasons for the external hard drive not mounting issue. The following are a few of the most common ones:

Hardware and connectivity issue

Most of the time, you can't mount your external drive on a Mac just because the connectivity is not in proper condition. This issue may be affected by a loose fitting, a broken USB cable, the wear on USB ports, etc.

Sometimes, such connectivity issues could make your external drives keep disconnecting, or much worse, it would make your external hard drive unmountable eventually. After all, it is essential to have a firm and tight connection.

Corrupted disk

Another possible reason for an unmounted disk may come from the problematic hard drive itself. Wonder how could it be? Well, it is possible that you're unable to mount a drive just because it is corrupted and unrecognizable by macOS.

You can recall if your external drive has experienced one of these things: an unsafe removal when you are transferring files, an improper ejection, a sudden power outage, or even a virus infection. If so, your disk might be corrupted and it should be the culprit that you are unable to mount your external drive probably.

Incorrect formatting of the disk

In some cases, an unsupported file system will make your external drive unmountable. It is reasonable because if your Mac can't even read your disk's file system, how can you mount and access this hard drive on your Mac? This factor may not be as possible as the other causes, but it does happen.

Unable to mount external hard drives on Mac, how to fix?

Even though the reasons for a not mounting disk are different from case to case, certainly there are some things you can do to fix this issue. The following are five effective solutions to the 'external hard drives won't mount on Mac' issue, and some of them are just basic checks.

Solution 1: Check and fix connectivity issues

The first thing you can do is to make sure that your disk is connected to your Mac properly.

If you are not sure if there is a problem with the USB port/hub, you can plug a working external drive in to a port/on a hub, unmount and eject it. Then plug the unmountable external hard drive into that port/hub.

Also, here are some things you can try.

• 1. Reconnect your external hard drive to your Mac and ensure that it fits the USB port snugly.
• 2. Connect the external hard drive to a different USB port or a different Mac.
• 3. Replace the USB cable or adapter in case that it was damaged or broken.
• 4. Connect it to a Windows PC and see if the storage device is powered on and working.

Solution 2: Check the file system of the external hard drive

Well, if you don't know exactly what file system your disk is formatted with while your external hard drive can't be mounted now, you can go to Disk Utility to have a check if it is formatted with an unsupported file system.

Remember that macOS is friendly with APFS and HFS+ and is in a neutral attitude with FAT, FAT32, and exFAT. However, it is a different story if you need to access and write to NTFS file system on Mac. By default, macOS only enables NTFS drive read support but disables write support. In this case, you can download a free NTFS driver for macOS to mount this external hard drive in read and write mode.

Still unable to mount the external hard drive on Mac? Then it should be some problems with the drive itself. Then you can go with the following solutions to troubleshoot this problem.

Wait! Have you recovered your important data from this unmountable drive?

Before you go any further to fix this unmountable hard drive, you'd better make sure you have backed up your data on this drive to avoid data loss. The reason is that when your external drive won't mount, you lose the only access to all your files on this drive.

In this situation, if you have important files on the external hard drive, any operations on the drive could overwrite the original data and cause irreparable data loss.

Forget to back up before? You can also use Mac data recovery software like iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover lost data from the unmountable external hard drives.

iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is a free external hard drive data recovery tool that enables you to recover lost data from external drives, especially when a hard drive is unmounted, formatted, inaccessible, unreadable, or corrupted.

It's fully compatible with macOS Big Sur 11/Catalina 10.15/Mojave 10.14/High Sierra 10.13/10.12 and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7. In addition to external hard drive data recovery, it also can recover lost data from internal Mac hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, memory cards, pen drives, etc.

Tutorial to recover lost data from unmountable external drive on Mac with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

• 1. Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on Mac, and then restart the computer.
• To use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac, you need to install this software on your Mac. You can just download the installation package and install it with no fuss.
• 2. Launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
• After successfully downloading this program on your Mac, you can drag it to your Applications folder to install it, or you can double-click its icon to launch it.
• 3. Select the unmountable external drive and click Scan button to scan all lost data.
• When the Mac data recovery software is launched, all connected storage devices will be listed in the interface. You can see the name, file system, and space allocation of your hard drives and partitions. Locate your unmounted external hard drive, select it, and click 'Scan' to scan for lost data.
• Two scanning modes are allowed: Quick scan and Deep scan. Quick scan mode saves time for users and is applied when data is recently deleted. Deep scan mode finds more files at the cost of more time, and it's used when file system is corrupted or partition table is lost. Anyway, this software will automatically choose the most efficient way to scan for files according to the disk condition.
• 4. Preview the searching results, choose files you need, and click Recover to get them back.
• With the preview feature, you can check whether your files on this unmountable disk are in a good condition or not. It saves time and money for users. The software will show if your file is corrupted so that you would not waste energy to recover it or pay for this data recovery product.
• 5. Have a check to ensure you have got all lost data back.

Now you either have a copy of a data backup in hand, or have recovered your important files with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac. Therefore, you can go ahead to repair this unmounted external drive without worrying about data loss.

Solution 3: Repair the external hard drive with Disk Utility

My Book Duo Won't Mount On Mac Osx

When an external hard drive is not working properly, you can use the built-in disk repair tool - First Aid to check and repair disk errors.

• 1. Launch Disk Utility.
• 2. Choose the unmountable external drive on the left sidebar.
• 3. Select First Aid in the top center and click Run.

My Book Duo Won 27t Mount On Macbook Pro

Solution 2: Repair the external hard drive with Terminal

Sometimes, Disk Utility may not function as desired. Fortunately, you can still try to repair the corrupted external hard drive with Terminal.

• 1. Go to Applications > Terminal
• 2. Enter: diskutil list (This will list out the available volumes).
• 3. Check the volume identifier from the table that appears.
• 4. Enter: diskutil repairVolume [diskvolume identifier]. For example, if the volume identifier of an external hard drive is disk2s, you should enter: diskutil repairVolume disk2s.

Solution 3: Reformat the external hard drive

If yourexternal hard drive can't be repaired with Disk Utility and Terminal, the file system of this drive might be seriously corrupted. The only way to fix this unmountable external drive is to reformat it.

Warning: Reformatting will erase all data on the external hard drive, so please make sure you have backed up important data.

• 1. Launch Disk Utility from Utilities.
• 2. Click the icon of the unmountable external drive on the left part of the window.
• 3. Click the Erase function on the top of the Disk Utility window.
• 4. Complete the related information (name, format, scheme), then click Erase button.

Conclusion

My Book Duo Won't Mount On Mac Catalina

When you can't mount an external hard drive on your Mac, you can try the 5 methods introduced in this post. But no matter which solution you are going to try, to avoid data loss, you are always advised to back up your files or recover your data from this unmountable drive first with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.

My Book Duo Won't Mount On Mac Air

But if unfortunately, none of these solutions can make your hard drive work again, or your disk is not even detected or showing up in Disk Utility, then this drive might be physically damaged. Under this situation, you should send it to a local disk repair service and see if they can help.

My Book Duo Won't Mount On Mac Desktop

Good luck!