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external hard drive (My Passport for Mac) not recognised
- Thread starter 20ANO
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I've been using Catalina since the beta release and am now running 10.15.4 on a late 2013 Pro 13", early 2015 13" Air, and mid-2014 Pro 13". All three MacBooks are able to read and write to all flash drives and external drives I have connected.
It could be coincidence that the drive stopped being recognized after installing Catalina.
AFAIK, the USB connection is soldered directly to the drive's logic board which makes data recovery more difficult.
Have you tried the drive on another MacBook? Is it encrypted?
It could be coincidence that the drive stopped being recognized after installing Catalina.
AFAIK, the USB connection is soldered directly to the drive's logic board which makes data recovery more difficult.
Have you tried the drive on another MacBook? Is it encrypted?
I bet you’re running some proprietary Western Digital driver software. It probably shipped on the drive and you ran it when you bought the drive, either to provide formatting, security, or encryption. That driver is probably incompatible with Catalina.
Disk vendors think they are adding value with that crap, because they can advertise special features like encryption. But macOS already provides those things, so running that proprietary stuff is a big mistake. The first thing you should do with a new drive is reformat it using Disk Utility, to delete vendor proprietary crap.
The Western Digital support boards report similar problems. I think WD has issued an update to their driver. You might search for it and update to restore compatibility. But the best thing to do is reformat the drive and install their software from your machine.
community.wd.com
community.wd.com
Driver update:
But seriously, after you update the driver, save your data and reformat the disk! Then uninstall the WD software from your Mac. It’s toxic.
Disk vendors think they are adding value with that crap, because they can advertise special features like encryption. But macOS already provides those things, so running that proprietary stuff is a big mistake. The first thing you should do with a new drive is reformat it using Disk Utility, to delete vendor proprietary crap.
The Western Digital support boards report similar problems. I think WD has issued an update to their driver. You might search for it and update to restore compatibility. But the best thing to do is reformat the drive and install their software from your machine.
WD Drive Utilities - macOS Catalina Support
macOS Catalina 10.15 has been out for a couple months and Western Digital still hasn’t released an update that supports the new operating system. When I try to contact WD, I don’t get a response. I find it awful that I paid more than $319 for the My Book Duo to backup my Mac via Time Machine and...
community.wd.com
WD My Passport - macOS Catalina set up
Hi, I just bought WD My passport to use with my MacBook Air 2018 model which runs with macOS Catalina version 10.15.1 I have connected the device to my laptop but started reading posts here that my passport doesn’t work with Catalina. Before I start a nonsense journey: should I return the...
community.wd.com
Driver update:
But seriously, after you update the driver, save your data and reformat the disk! Then uninstall the WD software from your Mac. It’s toxic.
Last edited:
Thank you for suggesting this. I've just tried it on an old iBook G4 and it's recognised it and mounted and unmounted it ! So it's not the cord or the WD drive is it? (I've been running this drive fine for years with the previous OS versions).
At least you know the drive is good.
Other USB drives and devices are recognized on the original MacBook?
Was 10.15.4 the first version of Catalina you installed, or did you install Catalina at some earlier point and then later install 10.15.4?
I am trying to diagnose my own issue wherein my pair of USB 3.0 SSDs became corrupt immediately after 10.15.4 and refused to mount.
I am trying to diagnose my own issue wherein my pair of USB 3.0 SSDs became corrupt immediately after 10.15.4 and refused to mount.