When selecting the right external hard drive for Mac, WD My Passport is a preferred choice for creating data backups. This is because of two major reasons: First, it is made a by a trusted brand, and second, it performs well under heavy read/write operations.
Recently, a strange issue is plaguing this external hard drive. Many Mac users have found their WD My Passport external hard drives to be grayed out when connected to their Mac systems. In some cases, the connected drive was not even listed in Disk Utility. Most likely, it could be a logical error with the external hard drive or some form of corruption preventing macOS from mounting the drive.
If your WD My Passport external hard drive is grayed out on Mac or not showing on the system, the data on will naturally become inaccessible. To access your data on it, you must resolve the underlying issues discussed ahead.
Why is the WD My Passport External Hard Drive Grayed out on Mac?
Upon digging deeper online, we found some possible reasons for your WD My Passport external hard drive to show up as Grayed out on Mac. These are –
- Corrupt partition table
- File system errors
- Encryption errors
- Faulty SATA cable
- Bad sectors
Methods to Fix a Grayed-out WD My Passport External Hard Drive
As evident from the above list, most issues are logical and thus can be fixed using the built-in First Aid feature in Disk Utility. You may also try changing the SATA cables or plugging the external hard drive in another USB port. But if none of them works, then as a last resort, you can reformat the problematic WD My Passport external hard drive. Let’s look at these methods in detail.
Method 1: Run First Aid via Disk Utility
First Aid is a built-in feature of Disk Utility on every Mac system that allows users to find and repair errors with the disk drives. This utility can repair errors with external hard drives that are causing them to malfunction.
Disk utility can help you repair unmounted or grayed out WD My Passport external hard drive on your Mac. The steps are as follows –
- Open Disk Utility.
- Connect the problematic external hard drive with your Mac.
- Select the WD My Passport external hard drive.
- Click on the First Aid button at the top of the window.
- Let the disk repair process finish.
- Once the disk repair process is over, click Done.
Method 2: Reformat the Problematic External Hard Drive
While the First Aid utility can fix many logical issues. There are times when the issues are beyond the scope of this utility. In this case, the only way to get rid of issues is to reformat the problematic hard drive.
But reformatting a hard drive erases all data and causes data loss.
That’s right. Reformatting a hard drive will erase all the data on the malfunctioning external hard drive. Hence, before proceeding with it, we will try to recover data from the grayed out WD My Passport HDD first.
For that, we will use Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac. This robust software can easily help us recover files from an unmounted or inaccessible external hard drive. Additionally, this software brings added features, such as a drive monitor for monitoring the health and vitals of connected disk drives and a functionality to recover data from unbootable Macs.
The steps to use this software are pretty simple –
- Connect the problematic external hard drive to a Mac.
- Download and install Stellar Data Recovery Professional for Mac from its official website.
- Launch the software.
- On the first screen, select the type of data you want to recover. Click Next.
- On the next screen, select the problematic drive. Click Scan.
- Let the software scan the drive for any recoverable data. Once the scan is completed, preview the files to check them.
- If satisfied with the results, press the Recover button to save the file(s) on the desired location/device.
Now that you have successfully recovered your data from the grayed-out WD My Passport external hard drive, it is time to reformat the drive. Follow the steps below –
- Open Disk Utility and select the problematic external hard drive.
- Click on the Erase button at the top of the window.
- A window will appear.
- Give the external hard drive a new name, select the format, and partitioning scheme. Click Erase.
- Doing this will erase all the data, and you will have a fresh external hard drive to use.
- Once the process is over, reconnect the drive with your Mac. The drive should be operational and visible at various locations on your Mac.
Conclusion
An external drive becoming inaccessible or unmountable on a Mac is a complex situation. An inaccessible drive connected to a Mac shows as a grayed-out drive. We understand how it feels to lose your data temporarily. But with the right methods, as discussed above, you can easily resolve the greyed-out problem of your WD My Passport external hard drive.
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