New M1 mini - WD 8tb help

[Idontlike]

Hi.

My son received his first mac from Santa.
He has an 8tb WD hard drive but it won’t mount. It shows as storage in about this mac.
It is greyed out in disk utility and won’t mount. I have read people with large WD have a similar problem but I can’t solve it.
Any help would be amazing.

 

[Fishrrman]

What FORMAT is the drive in?
It would work best in a Mac format, specifically HFS+ (you want HFS+ on a platter-based hard drive, even with Macs that use APFS for their boot drives)

Did the drive come with "proprietary" WD software on it?
If so, you'd do best to REMOVE this software.
You may need the WD utilities app with which to do it:

WD Software

List of all WD firmware and software available for download.

support.wdc.com

What I'd do:
- get the WD utilities software
- use it to remove any factory-installed software, particularly if there's a "protected partition" on the drive
- once removed, you should be able to erase it using disk utility
- erase to HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled, GUID partition format).

Hmmm.... which Mac did you get him?
There have been complaints about the latest Macs (with Monterey) having problems connecting/mounting SOME (not "all", but "some") external drives...

 

[tensixturtle]

Did you already try to mount it in Disk Utility? There is a button at the top of the app window in the right corner. If it doesn't work and doesn't have any data on it, you could go to Disk Utility, select the drive, Erase, and APFS and GUID under the two drop downs. They should be the default options. This would make it only work with Macs running High Sierra or later. Or if you want to use it with PCs as well, ExFAT in the first dropdown would allow that. In the past, that has solved issues with not mounting.

 

[Idontlike]

Thank you both. I have not been able to mount it yet.
He received the base mac mini M1. It seems it had a few kernel panic while copying large data from hard drives already.

Regarding the 8tb drive. It was his main photo catalog and masters for LR. I have managed to mount another had drive with a back up of the images but now need to rebuild the catalog which will have some things out of order.

The best solution would be to mount the WD8tb however it may need to be erased once I successfully rebuild the LR catalog from back up.

Hope all that makes sense.

 

[now i see it]

This sounds so 1995

 

[Idontlike]

This sounds so 1995

Okay, well what was the solution in 1995?

 

[tensixturtle]

The best solution would be to mount the WD8tb however it may need to be erased once I successfully rebuild the LR catalog from back up.

That sounds like a good solution. I hope you are able to restore all the data!

 

[now i see it]

Okay, well what was the solution in 1995?

26 years have passed since 1995 and end users still have to struggle with hard drives formatted incorrectly. It’s ridiculous. I congratulate you on getting it going but man - hard drive manufacturers suck.

 

[Idontlike]

26 years have passed since 1995 and end users still have to struggle with hard drives formatted incorrectly. It’s ridiculous. I congratulate you on getting it going but man - hard drive manufacturers suck.

They do I can’t believe prices for ssd still.
And, where is my hoverboard?

Rebuilt the catalog. Grabbed a LaCie rugged to back things up to that. Now will try erase the 8tb.
If it mounts, is it likely to die again?
It seems fine, and mostly I feel it’s just a hiccup with it not being mounted for some reason.

 

[tensixturtle]

If it mounts, it should be fine but I'd definitely make sure it stays backed up. If it happens again I wouldn't be comfortable trusting it to store data.

I do believe the prices for an SSD, although still high, have come down significantly. Four years ago, a 128GB SSD cost well over $100, and now you can pick one up for $20.