Macbook Pro doesn't recognize WD External Drive

[bvon]

I've got a Mid 2015 MacBook Pro running Monterey.
A WD 1TB My Passport quit being recognized by the system after several times of inadvertently being unplugged without ejecting. It's got a micro usb connection that would fall out a lot. The drive lights up and whirrs when connected and the light stays solid but I can't see the drive. Here's what I've tried.

Tried a different USB cable
Tried different USB port
Tried it on another computer w/ same result
Enabled see external disks
Looked for it in Disk Utility but it doesn't show up.
Looked for it with Terminal list command but it doesn't show up
Rebooted
Upgraded to Monterey
Tried WD Utilities
Tried to manually force quit the fsck process from activity monitor but there is no fsck process running.
Downloaded a couple of different recovery programs Recoverit and Easus and it's not recognized.
It did show up with Easeus twice but when I tried to search the disk it spontaneously dropped/disconnected after 2 - 3 minutes.

Of course the files on their are not backed up. I was working my way towards that over the next few days. Anyway I'd like to get at them. I know data recovery would seem to be my next step but I thought I'd reach out to see if anyone had any other suggestions/recommendations. It seems the issue is from the frequent disconnecting without ejecting but I'm not sure what else to try.

 

[Fishrrman]

I was about to suggest trying the drive on a different Mac, but looks like you already tried that.

Drives can fail (and WD doesn't have that great a track record).
Is the micro USB port the only connection on the drive?

Just some thoughts in no particular order...

I'd try downloading "Data Rescue" and see if it could "find" the drive. DR is a data-recovery application that is very good.

The problem could be the drive itself. Or, it could just be the connection circuitry. Or, it could be the drive controller board.

Is the drive enclosure "open-able"?
A problem with prepackaged drives is that they're usually designed so that they CANNOT be easily opened by the user.

But... I'd see if I could get the case open. IF that can be done, the drive itself might be taken out and put into another enclosure or into a USB3/SATA docking station.

HOWEVER -- be aware that WD may have used some kind of "proprietary connection scheme" with the drive, and that the drive itself may not have a "standard SATA connector" on it. But you might only find this out after opening the drive.

A personal experience:

I just had a micro SD card (in a USB dongle reader) go "dark" on me a couple of days ago -- because I may have removed it prematurely after "ejecting" it.

Wouldn't show up in the dongle again, nor on a card reader on my MacBook.

I recall that disk utility saw the Mac partition on the card, but it was "dismounted" and would not mount even after clicking du's "mount" button.

There was nothing on the card that was of real importance, but I still wanted to see if I could get the data back.

I had an old copy of Drive Genius that I'd scrounged up long ago (version 3.0). I launched DG, and started trying the options one-by-one. DG's "defragment" option DID see the card, and it actually was able to defragment it. Card still wouldn't mount, however. But the fact that DG "saw data on the card" and could act upon it gave evidence that the data was still there.

After I fooled with the card using Drive Genius, I tried opening an older copy of Data Rescue that I have.
Hmmm... DR sees the data, and offers to recover it.
So... I recovered the data to a "disk image" I created on the desktop (you need a "scratch drive" so that DR has a place to which to recover files).

Then, I used disk utility to re-format the card to HFS+.
And finally, I copied the data BACK TO the card (from the disk image).

So... the process worked.
But... I had to try several options "to get there".

A lesson for the future:
Critical/important data is NEVER safe, unless it exists on two (or more) drives...!

 

[bvon]

Thanks for your detailed reply.

I tried data rescue but it couldn't see the drive. I also tried the lite version of Drive Genius and it did see the drive briefly but then it disappeared. I've had this same issue with recovery software and even searching the drive via terminal. It showing up is inconsistent and doesn't last long enough for me to do anything meaningful with the drive.

I opened it up and yep, it's proprietary, not SATA. Thanks WD. I attached pix.