Hi Winston, Please be informed that the WD My Passport Ultra for Mac drive is a plug and play device tested and designed only for Mac computers for seamless operation. The drive is preformatted in HFS+J format for Mac OS. However, you can reformat the drive in exFAT format to use it on both Windows and Mac Computers. The defect is probably in the WD My Passport Ultra controller. These all in one drive and controllers from WD, Seagate, etc. Are notorious for 'crapping out'. Often they have controllers that have the USB and SATA interfaces in one circuit board so if they die, both the drive and the circuit board, are useless.
Connect your Western Digital My Passport drive to Mac computer, and let the OS detect and mount the drive for use. Now, a new hard drive icon will appear on the desktop. On macOS Dock, select Finder. When the Finder window opens, on the menu bar, select ‘Go’ and then ‘Utilities.’. My Passport Ultra for Mac is formatted for Time Machine and ready to deliver plug-and-play storage out of the box. With WD Discovery™ software, you can also work across both Mac and PC. We provide a downloadable HFS+ driver for Windows® 10, 8.1 or 7 to enable you to read and write to your My Passport Ultra for Mac drive without reformatting.
Summary: This article analyzes why the WD My Passport for Mac drive is not mounting/working on Mac and how to fix this issue. If you worry about losing data, you can recover data from the WD hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac at first.
This page will analyze why WD My Passport drive won't mount on Mac, and provides 7 possible solutions to this issue.
- 1. Show the mounted WD My Passport for Mac hard drive on Mac destop
- 2. Force Mount the WD Mac hard drive in Disk Utility
- 3. Run First Aid to fix WD My Passport for Mac not mounting error
- 4. Check the power supply of the WD My Passport for Mac drive
- 5. Check the USB cable
- 6. Check the USB port of your Mac
- 7. Check for driver update
What is meant by mounting a WD My Passport drive on Mac?
The WD My Passport for Mac hard drive is specially designed for Mac mini computers, iMacs, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. You can access My passport for Mac drives only when macOS recognizes the format of the drive. This process is called mounting.
However, once your computer fails to recognize that format (also known as file system), the WD My Passport for Mac hard drive is not mounting on Mac computer.
Why is WD My Passport for Mac not mounting?
WD hard drives, including My Passport and Easystore, won't mount on Mac when the disk format is not recognized. Such error could be caused by virus infection, sudden power failure, sudden power outage, unwanted interruption during transferring data, etc. If the external hard drive won't mount, you can't open this WD My Passport for Mac drive and access your important files.
Here is one typical case from forums:
WD My Passport for Mac hard drive (2 TB) won't mount on my MacBook Air, grayed out in Disk Utility. I have 1 TB family photos on this hard drive, which are very precious for me. How to fix if WD My Passport for Mac not working on Mac? Any data recovery solution? Thanks a lot!
If you haven't got an effective workaround when WD My passport hard drive fails to mount in Finder or Disk Utility, this page will help. You'll know how to mount the Western Digital my passport drive on Mac again.
How to fix the unmounted WD My Passport hard drive on Mac?
The connected WD My Passport drive should be automatically mounted on the desktop, in Finder and Disk Utility. When it won't mount on Mac as you expect, you can try these methods.
1. Show the mounted WD My Passport for Mac hard drive on Mac destop
Sometimes, the My Passport drive is recognized and mounted by the Mac, and you just don't see it. You can go to Finder > Preferences and confirm if the 'External Disks' under 'Show these items on the desktop' is selected. This will ensure if the external drives connected to this Mac are allowed to show on the desktop.
But if your WD My Passport drive is not even showing up, it's reasonable that you can't see it mounting on Mac. Then, you shoud check the connections and some hardware issues.
2. Force Mount the WD Mac hard drive in Disk Utility
You can go to Utility and see if this hard drive appears in the left sidebar. If your WD My Passport for Mac drive for Mac is not mounting but grayed out in Disk Utility, you can right-click and select the 'Mount' button to force mount the hard drive. However, if this external hard drive is corrupted, the 'Mount' button will not be available and you need to try the next solution.
But sometimes, you can't mount a hard drive on Mac because of internal disk errors like file system corruption, partition table lost, the directory is corrupted, etc. You WD My Passport for Mac drive won't be recognized by your Mac in these cases. Fortunately, you can fix the hard drive not mounting issue with the native disk repair tool, First Aid.
3. Run First Aid to fix WD My Passport for Mac not mounting error
First Aid is a Mac built-in tool to verify and check minor problems of a hard disk. Whenever you can't mount a WD hard drive or My Passport for Mac is not working, First Aid should be a good disk repair tool.
- Step 1: Go to /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility/, then click Continue.
- Step 2: In the sidebar, select the unmounted WD My Passport for Mac hard drive.
- Step 3: Click the 'First Aid' button.
- Step 4: Click Run.
If Disk Utility reports that the WD My Passport for Mac hard drive appears to be OK or has been repaired, you're done. Otherwise, this WD My Passport drive has been corrupted. You have to retrieve your data from this corrupted hard drive as soon as possible.
When those methods didn't make any difference and the WD My passport for Mac hard drive is not mounting still, you need to check some hardware issues that get involved in the disk connection.
Let's start with some basics factors.
4. Check the power supply of the WD My Passport for Mac drive
It's well known that insufficient or no power supply in USB ports could also lead to hard drive not mounting issue. Therefore, you should make sure the WD My Passport for Mac hard drive is getting the appropriate power. If the drive came with a Y-cable, use both USB connectors. Moreover, do not connect the drive through a USB hub, connect it directly to the Mac. Make sure the power adapter is connected directly to a wall outlet, not to an extension cord.
5. Check the USB cable
When external hard drive is not showing up on Mac, ensure the cable is properly connected to both the drive and computer. Then try connecting your WD My Passport for Mac hard drive with a new USB cable if you can fetch another one.
6. Check the USB port of your Mac
If the problem still continues, try using a different USB port. Perhaps your Mac has two USB port - the back and front ones. Assuming the My passport driveis plugged in the front USB port, try to insert the drive to the back USB port.
7. Check for driver update
If the hardware seems to be OK, let's check the software that related to this disk problem. The My passport disk driver, a software component, bridges the operating system and the drive to communicate with each other. But the files of My passport driver could be deleted, outdated, or corrupted for virus invasion or misoperation.
So, when the WD My Passport drive is not working or the external hard drive won't mount on Mac, check the disk driver.
- Step 1: Click the Apple icon and select 'App Store…'
- Step 2: Click Update (NOT UPGRADE!) to install a specific update or Update All to install all available updates.
Sometimes, WD My Passport for Mac driver, software, and WD disk tool are needed, especially when you want to open a WD My Passport for Mac drive that is locked. You can go to WD official website and download software for WD My Passport troubleshooting and for WD My Passport driver update.
How to fix WD My Passport for Mac hard drive not mounting error without losing data?
However, if WD My Passport for Mac hard drive still won't mount on Mac, the last solutions is to reformat the hard drive. But reformatting will delete all data stored on the hard drive, and most of the time, many important files are stored on the WD My Passport for Mac hard drive.
If you haven't backed up important files, how can you recover files from the WD My Passport drive? It's high time to recover lost data from the unmounted hard drive first.
Step 1: Recover lost data from unmountable hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac
As for Mac data recovery, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is highly recommended as it's a free Mac data recovery software. It can easily retrieve files from WD Passport drives. This software can recover lost data from corrupted hard drive, unreadable hard drives, formatted hard drives, unrecognized hard drives, unmountable hard drives, inaccessible hard drives, and recover lost data from uninitialized hard drive.
You can use this hard drive data recovery software on macOS Big Sur 11/Catalina 10.15/Mojave 10.14/High Sierra 10.13/10.12 Sierra and Mac OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7.
- 1. Free download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
- 2. Launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac and select the unmounted WD My Passport for Mac hard drive.
- 3. Click 'Scan' to search for all lost files on this drive.
- 4. Preview the listed scanning results, choose files we want, and click 'Recover' button to get them back.
Hopefully, you'll get all your files off after the WD My Passport is not working nor mounting.
Step 2: Fix WD My Passport for Mac drive not mounting error by reformatting
After getting lost files back, you can fix WD My Passport for Mac hard drive not mounting error by reformatting without worrying about losing data. This will reset the WD My Passport hard drive.
• Guide to reformat WD My Passport for Mac external hard drive
Conclusion
WD My passport for Mac hard drives always offer quick and easy way to expand the storage space of your computer. It has amazing features like cloud storage, password protection with hard drive encryption, and compatiblity with Apple's Time Machine backup software, so that you can store a massive amount of photos, videos, music and documents.
But the WD My Passport for Mac drive not mounting issue will call a halt on all these good things. You need to repair the WD My Passport for Mac that is not working or corrupted first, and recover data with the assistance of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
For any questions or suggestions, please email us below.
In this WD My Passport Ultra Review, all the things about this drive are discussed honestly.
Western Digital My Passport Ultra Portable Drive is one of the popular external hard drives among the consumers who know the importance of data, and it’s backup.
Isn’t It?
Not the Number One but still WD My Passport Ultra is a high-profile name in hard drives list and one of the smart portable model of its family.
Contents
- 4 Final Verdict
WD(Western Digital) My Passport Ultra Review 1TB & 2TB
The new Western Digital My Passport has also earned the title of Editor’s choice in our list of Top Ten best external hard drives. Western Digital My Passport Ultra also gives the storage capacity up to 3Tb, but this is not the only cool thing about WD. We can also say it wd SmartWare review due to its popularity
It is on the list of best sellers due to the versatility, affordable price, performing excellently in the areas of security and backup software, and in numerous help and support channels. You can use WD My Passport Ultra for MAC and PC both, but there are a certain set of actions you need to take to work with MAC because by default it comes prepared to work with Windows use.
WD My Passport is available in different colors including the black, white, blue and berry with an option for more than 20 mix-and-match colors available in WD Grip Packs. WD can easily fit in your pocket due to it’s compact size. Also, Backup Software is very easy to use, and the encryption of drive is totally lossless and has no effect on the performance of the drive. The speed gives almost equal to Seagate backup plus.
WD My Passport Ultra is the successor of the WD My Passport Edge and way faster than WD Edge. The WD Ultra offers a generous amount of storage capacity of more than 4TB Previously we had wd my passport ultra 2tb and wd my passport ultra 1tb which are still available in the market. SmartWare backup software is included with the drive. The design of the drive is very attractive, and when combined with selected colors it looks beautiful while holding in your hand. Didn’t Agreed with me? Try yourself.
In simple words, the WD Ultra is a little wonder in the world of external hard drives that is compact and offers a generous amount of storage capacity to carry your data or backup, and while ready to go with you on travel and giving an excellent performance the new. The editor of wd my passport ultra review recommends My Passport Ultra is an excellent buy.
Design and Features
You will be misconceived if you see the WP My Passport Ultra because it looks similar to My Passport Edge. The only difference that can be pointed out is the word “Edge” is replaced with “Ultra” on the casing. Either way the drive is very much similar to it’s predecessor. Being light weight and compact the drive feels sturdy a little bit.
The New My Passport Ultra has dimensions of 3.21 x 4.33 x 0.83 and weighs 0.5 lb.A Mirco-USB 3.0 port is available on the side of the drive to connect the USB cable that comes along with the drive purchase. This cable serves for the power and data tasks both the same time and gets relaxed still more to come. WD Ultra is also backward compatible means if you wanted to use it for USB 2.0 you can use it but to get the maximum performance of WD Ultra; the recommendation is to use it with USB 3.0.Few people might think what is wd smartware but this is it
As i stated above that the drive comes prepared to work with windows directly as the drive is preformatted NTFS for Windows. In Case you are MAC user and want to use the Ultra for you MAC then it’s a simple process to reformat the drive for your MACs(HFS+). The backup software called WD SmartWare is also included in the drive to take the necessary backups as WD Drive Utilities and WD Security.
The Drive also comes with 3 years limited warranty so in case you got an issue with the drive you replace it from the vendors. You can upgrade to the WD SmartWare Pro version at free of cost. This piece of software works with all external hard drives, also the drives offered by other vendors. If you are Ultra user, you can activate the WD SmartWare at two times on two different computers. This brief wd my passport ultra review is best to select a drive for you.
WD SmartWare is not required to install for the drive to work. But it is useful. The WD Drive Utilities contains the utilities that are responsible for the drive status, drive functionality and to reformat it. Your contents in the drive can be secured or password protected with the WD security.
The drive supports very strong encryption and the password selected once is always the key to access your data on the drive. MAC users also pay close attention because both of these WD Drive Utilities and WD Security are available for them as well as Windows users.
But WD SmartWare is not available for MAC users it is only available for the Windows users. Nothing to worry for the MAC users as there is always a solution for a problem. Then can install Time Machine with to take the Backup of their data. Though WD SmartWare performs the very handy job for this task but with Time Machine that’s not a big deal.
This software is very smart it automatically takes the backup of your important data to incase you are not a computer geek. The best thing about WD SmartWare is that now you can take backups to Dropbox Online service just you need a dropbox account. Then leave it on the software.
WD wd SmartWare review Ultra Performance
While using the 4TB version with USB 3.0 the Ultra performed 130MPs for writing that is close to the double of My Passport Edge, and it gave 118MBps speed for reading which is also the double of WD Edge. So this is the fasted score for any USB 3.0 external hard drive i have tested so far.I hope that in this brief wd my passport ultra review we explained well abou this little wonder now it’s your turn to take action.After getting your hard drive the very first thing to get the drive in use is to make partitions of it and see this guide how to make partitions for more information.
Final Verdict
Wd My Passport Ultra Mac Driver
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