WD Passport not mounting, not in disk utility savvyuh Sep 30, 2015, 10:48 AM Hi, I have my external storage is not longer mounting and does not appear in disk utility on mac air.
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Click to expand.I think that WD Passports have been using those combo boards for several years. Customer called up 3-4 years ago wanting me to look at one he had that stopped mounting. Typical story. Customer - It's my backup me - Great, just get another Passport and copy all your stuff over from your machine. Customer - It's not on my machine, it's on my backup me - A backup means you have two copies of something in/on different devices. So you don't have a backup I cracked it open thinking I could just pull off the USB2SATA bridge but no such luck. That's why I do not recommend those anymore.
The problem is it's getting harder and harder to find external portable drives with a separate, removable bridge. Click to expand.I kindly suggest that imaging in this condition is not recommended, as it is not in the end user's best interest (the owner of the data).
The drive has reading issues, where 'reading' means the heads being able to read the firmware (the main firmware is stored on the disks, which is where the capacity/size of the drive is coming from and posting to the host OS) and, further, user data. Now, as is, every single time the drive is being connected, the host OS not only tries to read data from the drive over and over excessively, but also potentially tries to write to drive (as most OSes are designed to run checkdisk scans and what not). Furthermore, the drive's firmware, internally, is reallocating bad sectors to defect lists, trying to cope with the deteriorated condition, potentially chugging away data from sectors belonging to files. The longer the drive stays powered on as is, the more of this reallocation is happening in the background. When the drive mounts and posts the correct capacity and there aren't many bad sectors, sure, ddrescue or whatever basic imaging/cloning tool, that has bad sectors skipping functionality, could work and succeed in obtaining a decent outcome. Anything beyond that is jeopardizing with the owner's data.
We see those My Passports every day requiring firmware modifications, mechanical work, etc after they have been pounded by trivial attempts to read data from. Just as a heads up, the 3TB and 4TB versions of My Passport sound perfectly normal upon powering on, even when they have light mechanical damage. Those models have been starting to fail in large numbers now that they have been out there on the market for 1+ years. Before proceeding with full imaging.
It is critical to understand what is the root problem(s) with the drive (bad heads, firmware, only bad sectors, PCB, motor, etc). With trivial testing, if the drive isn't mounting or if it mounts and begin imaging and it skips a lot due to bad sectors, then should really stop the recovery attempt.
It is not a good idea to continue, as it causes more damage. Click to expand.The first few parts of the thread the OP only said it did not mount in Windows or Linux. If that was being the only symptom, to connect it to a linux machine(unmounted) to see if the drive was detecting the proper size and drive name is reported is a decent way to determine if it is initializing properly. If it was initializing properly, then to do a quick check if it can read sectors at a good rate is a fair test to do to determine its health. At that point you could decide how to handle it from there. But, I missed this at the end of the thread, which I just read this morning. This changes things.
. 1 Answer SOURCE: I had the same problem with my passport-mac connection. When i first purchased the passport and plugged it in, I had no problems, the icon came right up on my desktop. Then i backed up my entire computer which is only about 25-30 GB. After that, when I plugged the passport in, it didn't seem to be recognized but the light came on and the drive made noise. I searched for answers, and even considered downloading some of the stuff people recommended. But then I realized, if I let it sit, after about 20 minutes, the icon popped up on my desktop.
I am not a computer person, but to me, it seems that because there is a decent amount of information on my passport (although no even close to full) my computer needed some time to read the entire disk in order to use it. Hope that helps. Posted on Aug 11, 2009.