Summary: This article gives the proven methods to fix the issue of WD My Passport for Mac not showing up or working on Mac. To avoid data loss, use iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover your data to a safe place.
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iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac
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When you need to access your data after years of using your reliable WD My Passport, your device could fail and your files for some reason are not accessible anymore.
These are some problems that could happen:
Either way, your important data on this drive will become inaccessible and concerns you a lot.
If the WD My Passport is not showing up on the Mac desktop, Finder, or Disk Utility after connecting to your Mac, how to find it and make it work? If you can't see files from WD external hard drive on Mac, how to access data? You'll get answers here.
To fix WD My Passport for Mac not showing up, try these fixes:
If a message like: "You must run the WD hard drive Unlock application from the WD hard drive Unlock CD associated with the drive, you want to unlock" pops up and you can't open or unlock your WD passport drive:
This has been discussed a lot that WD hard drive not working after the macOS Monterey update or when connecting to an Apple Silicon M1 MacBook Air.
If you have used WD Utilities or have created a secure password to keep others from accessing the files on the drive, you have to type the password to unlock the drive (unless you enable auto-unlock for this computer) each time:
Besides, you have to unlock the WD passport drive with your password even if you have uninstalled the WD My Passport software from your Mac.
To fix WD My Passport not working on Mac or WD unlocker not working (though you know the right password) after the macOS Monterey update, simply download, update, and install the latest WD Discovery Utilities for macOS 12 macOS Monterey.
If unfortunately, you can't remember the password, you can only reformat the WD My Passport for Mac hard drive to make it work again, but at the expense of data loss. So, recover your data with iBoysoft data recovery software in advance.
Usually, malfunctioned USB port or Mac computer, a broken USB cable, and some other hardware problems could lead to WD My Passport/WD My Passport Ultra not showing up on Mac.
Before going further troubleshooting, doing the following basic checks is very necessary.
1. First simply check if the WD hard drive's LED is turned on and/or try to listen to if it makes any spinning sound.
2. Safely remove the WD My Passport and reconnect it to the USB port. As sometimes an older Mac is not able anymore to transfer all the power a new generation drive needs to run it properly, you can also try a USB hub with its independent power supply to feed the energy the drives need.
3. Check whether the USB cable and USB port are not working by connecting other hard drives to this USB port or USB cable and see if that makes a difference. You can make a test with a flash drive or a known working hard drive to check the cable integrity for example.
4. Reboot your Mac computer. In some cases the software (drivers, firmware) that sits in the USB port can be hung, after the reboot check again if your WD My Passport drive now is showing up in Disk Utility/Finder or not. Try also to shut down the Mac completely, wait 10 seconds, and then power on, sometimes the system just needs to start fresh from all background activities.
5. Use the Disk Utility to check the setup from your hard drive. Check if it's identified as USB External Physical Disk and GUID Partition Map. Then check if the WD passport drive is formatted to APFS (APFS partitions can't be recognized on macOS 10.12 or earlier versions), EXT4, or NTFS. Sometimes, the incompatible file system of the drive makes this WD My Passport not detected.
If the WD Passport not showing up or working on Mac issue still exists after the basic checks, go ahead to try out the solutions below to make it show up on Mac.
If the WD Passport not showing up in Finder and desktop, the configuration of the Finder Preferences may prevent your WD My Passport drive from being seen. In other words, you didn't allow the connected external hard drives to show up in the Finder or on the desktop.
To revert this situation, you must follow the guide below to set Finder Preferences and make the WD My Passport for Mac show up in Finder or on the desktop.
1. Go to Finder > Preferences > General tab.
2. Tick the "External disks" option to show the WD My Passport for Mac on the desktop.
3. Then, go to the Sidebar tab, and tick "External disks" under "Locations" to show your WD My Passport for Mac in the Finder sidebar.
4. Go to Desktop or Finder and check if your WD My Passport is showing up now. If not, download, and install iBoysoft Data Recovery on your Mac and then check if your WD My Passport is detected by this data recovery app.
If your WD My Passport is recognized by iBoysoft Data Recovery, follow the wizard to recover data and then format WD hard drive.
If your WD My Passport drive is not detected by iBoysoft Data Recovery either, send WD hard drive to an expert for reparation.
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iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac
Rating:4.8
