WD My Passport Ultra stopped getting detected on Macbook Air

[tushar13113]

Hello,

I have a Macbook Air 2015 and a WD My Passport Ultra hard drive.

The hard drive is formatted in exFAT format and used to work fine with my Macbook until recently. Now, when I connect it, the light on the drive turns on and I can feel the drive working (vibrations) but it is not detected on the Macbook. I checked DiskUtility on Macbook and the drive is not even listed there. Same case for the system report -- drive is not listed there. I plugged the drive into an old Windows laptop and the drive was working fine with it.

What could be the issue? The USB ports on the Macbook Air are working fine with other devices. I do not have another USB cable to test the drive with my Mac. I am using the cable that came with the drive (the same cable is working for the old Windows laptop).

I keep my Mac updated and it is possible that the drive stopped working after a certain update. How to detect this and fix it?

Is there any free tool that I could use to detect/repair the drive for my Mac?

Please help. Thank you.

 

[DR_Luke]

The WD MyPassport drives frequently fail for various reasons. If you value your data, it is best to seek professional assistance before further damage is caused. If you are lucky, it is just a matter of a few bad sectors and a firmware glitch that is easily recovered with professional tools for well under $500.

Affordable labs I recommend are:

Recovery Force
Data Medics
Data Savers
PC Image
Data Busters
Mind Merge

If you don't mind the risk of permanent data loss, you might want to try connecting the drive to a Linux system and attempting to clone with GNU ddrescue.