[SOLVED] External Hard drive Issue

[fishinrhoades]

I have a WD My Passport Ultra that is not being recognized on my Macbook Pro. Prior to this I had no problems with but I did have to interface it with Paragon. When I plug in the passport I get a message saying the Disk you inserted is not readable by this computer. I have the option initialize, ignore or ejected. I choose initialize and it says partition map and S.M.A.R.T. status not supported. Then i click on the first aid button at the to of Disk Utility and it says operation successful. In the past I had no issues but i did have to download paragon to get my passport to work.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to the TH Community, @fishinrhoades!

I'm sorry to hear about your issues with the WD My Passport external drive! I'd recommend you check the HDD for defects through the Disk Utility on your Mac and also download the WD Drive Utilities & Security for Mac, instead of using third-party applications. Once you select your WD product, you should be able all the available downloads for this particular model.

I'd also suggest you try the WD My passport on another Mac OS X computer to see how it will get recognized there as well.

Keep me posted.
SuperSoph_WD

 

[nolimits76]

If you are having to utilize the Paragon driver/extension, it sounds like the drive is NTFS formatted. Are you going back and forth between PC and Mac computers? I've had issues with my external drive on the Mac before, and plugging in on my work PC did the trick.

In general I have found the Paragon driver to be quite frustrating. First it annoyed me to have to pay for the functionality. After doing so, it seems to have stopped working as I've upgraded to various OS and currently on El Capitan.

In my case, I have a Seagate external drive and they offer a free "bastard" Paragon driver that only works on Seagate drives. Let me rephrase, it's SUPPOSED to work on them. It has never done so for me, which is why I bought the commercial version a few years back.

Recently, this become a thorn in my side once again as I was trying to do some backups. If you aren't aware, you can use the command line to force OS X to read & write NTFS drives without the use of the Paragon driver.

http://osxdaily.com/2013/10/02/enable-ntfs-write-support-mac-os-x/

The downside (at least for me) is that it no longer automounts on the desktop like before. You can get around this by creating manual shortcuts and/or utilizing /volumes so it pops in the Finder view.

So far this seems to be the less of two evils for me. Maybe it can help you too.