By Katrina | Posted to Home > Mac Data Recovery Tips, updated on August 20th, 2021User rating:

Plug It into Another USB Port. You can connect the WD My Passport Ultra to your PC with. My Passport Not Showing Up When Plugged In Mac I Have; My Passport Not Showing Up When Plugged In Mac I Have. Once you are sure that the WD My Passport is corrupted and becomes inaccessible, you had better stop performing any further operation to this external and then you can use data recovery software to get back lost data.

Summary: Here you will find 5 methods to fix WD My Passport for Mac drive not showing up or working on Mac. To avoid data loss, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac can help save your data to a safe place.

Everything has flaws, even the WD My Passport for Mac drive that you used for years.

It happens frequently that:

• WD My Passport won't show up when connecting to your Mac computer
• WD My Passport is greyed out in Disk Utility
• WD external hard drive light on but not working after macOS Big Sur update
• WD My Passport drive won't open WD unlocker application on M1 Mac
• Mac didn't unlock the WD My Passport drive but asking for the WD Drive Unlock application
• WD My Passport Ultra becomes encrypted or unreadable on your Mac

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 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.

Solutions for fixing WD My Passport drive not showing up on Mac

• Method 1: Do the basic checks
• Method 2: Check Finder Preferences
• Method 3: Install the latest WD drive unlock application
• Method 4: Check & repair drive in Disk Utility
• Method 5: Recover data and erase the drive
• Method 6: Repair your WD hard drive in local shop

Fix 1: Do the basic checks

Usually, malfunctioned USB port or Mac computer, the broken USB cable, and some hardware problems could make WD My Passport not showing up.

Before going further troubleshooting, do the following basic checks is very necessary.

1. Safely remove the WD My Passport and reconnect it to the USB port. Try quickly plug or slowly plug, which sometimes just works for no reason.

2. Check whether the USB cable or USB port is bad by connecting other hard drives to this USB port or cable and see if that makes a difference.

3. Reboot your Mac computer to see if your WD My Passport drive is not showing up in Disk Utility/Finder or not.

4. Connect the WD My Passport to another Mac or Windows PC, which will find out if it is the incompatible file system of the drive that makes this WD My Passport undetectable.

If the WD My Passport for Mac still doesn't show up or work on Mac after the basic checks, go ahead to try out the solutions as below to make it show up on Mac.

Fix 2: Check Finder Preferences

If your WD My Passport is not showing up in Finder and desktop, it's possible that the configuration of the Finder Preferences prevents your WD My Passport drive from showing up.

In other words, you didn't allow the connected external hard drives to show up in the Finder or on the desktop.

Now, 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. Go to the Sidebar tab, tick 'External disks' under 'Locations' to show your WD My Passport for Mac in Finder.
• 4. Go to Desktop or Finder and check if your WD My Passport is showing up. If not, download, install iBoysoft Data Recovery on your Mac and then check if your WD My Passport is detected by iBoysoft Data Recovery.
• 5. 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.

Solution 3: Install the latest WD drive unlock application

Typically, if you have received a message like 'You must run the WD Drive Unlock application from the WD Drive Unlock CD associated with the drive you want to unlock' and you can't open or unlock your WD drive (My Passport):

This has been discussed a lot that WD hard drive not working after the macOS Big Sur 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:

1. You shut down or restart your Mac.
2. You disconnect and reconnect the WD My Passport.
3. Your Mac wakes up from sleep mode.

Besides, you have to unlock the WD drive with your password even if you have uninstalled the WD My Passport software from your Mac.

To fix that Western Digital My Passport hard drives not working or unlock (though you know the right password) after the macOS Big Sur update, simply download, update, and install the latest WD Discovery Utilities for macOS 11 Big Sur.

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, recovering your data with iBoysoft data recovery software in advance.

Fix 4: Check & repair drive in Disk Utility

If the WD Passport hard drive is not showing up in Finder after trying the above methods, you can see whether it is showing up in Disk Utility or not.

Usually, you could have two results:

Case 1: Your WD My Passport drive is detected and showing up in Disk Utility, but it is greyed out or not mounting.

Case 2: Your WD hard drive is not recognized, so it's not showing up in Disk Utility at all.

Here, we'll show you solutions to case 1.

1. Manually Mount WD My Passport for Mac in Disk Utility

Sometimes, hard drives cannot be automatically mounted in Disk Utility, even though Mac has detected the hard drive. So it's possible that you'll see the WD My Passport for Mac drive not mounting in Disk Utility.

In this situation, you can manually mount the hard drive.

• 1. Go to Finder>Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility.
• 2. Click Show All Devices in View option at the left corner of Disk Utility.
• 3. Select your WD My Passport for Mac drive from the left sidebar and click the Mount button on the top of the Disk Utility window.

Instead, you can also click on the mount icon beside the drive to mount it immediately.

2. Repair WD My Passport for Mac drive with First Aid

If you can't mount the WD My Passport for Mac manually, there should be some file system problems in this drive.

But don't worry. There is a native repair tool called First Aid in Disk Utility, which can analyze and repair basic hard drive errors especially with file systems and catalogs, extends, volume bit maps.

To run First Aid to check the WD My Passport hard drive:

• 1. Go to Disk Utility.
• 2. Select the WD hard drive.
• 3. Click First Aid on the top of the Disk Utility window and then click Run.

After running First Aid, try to mount the WD Passport hard drive again to check if it can be mounted and accessed now.

If your WD My Passport drive cannot mounted, try next solution to recover data and then erase the drive.

Fix 5: Recover data and erase the drive

If First Aid was unable to repair the errors in the WD My Passport, it means that the file system of the WD drive has been damaged. Common, to fix the WD My Passport for Mac drive that's not showing up on Mac, you have to reformat it.

The question is, reformatting will assign a new file system but will also erase all data on this drive as well. Hence, firstly, recover data from WD drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery.

Tutorial to recover data from My Passport for Mac hard drive:

• 1. Download, install and launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on Mac.
• 2. Select My Passport for Mac and click the Scan button to scan all data on this drive.
• 3. Preview the searching results, choose files you need, and click Recover to get them back.

Next, you can courageously proceed to erase your WD My Passport for Mac hard drive with no fuss.

• 1. Open Disk Utility.
• 2. Select the WD My Passport for Mac drive in the left sidebar.
• 3. Click Erase on the top of the Disk Utility window.
• 4. Complete the information for your WD drive (such as new format, partition scheme, and so on) and click Erase.

Fix 6: Send your WD My Passport drive for repair

If My Passport for Mac hard drive is not showing up in Disk Utility, it means that the WD hard drive is not recognized or detected by the Mac. Very probably, your My Passport for Mac has some hardware problems. You'd better send it to a local reparation center.

Understanding why My Passport drive not showing up on Mac

Sometimes, an external hard drive not showing up on Mac just because the USB cable or the USB port on your Mac is bad. In addition, the following reasons may also lead to WD My Passport for Mac not showing up or not working.

• Recent macOS update issue
• System failure
• Virus infection
• Motherboard issue
• WD My Passport drive damage or corruption

Bonus Maintenance Tips for WD My Passport drives for Mac

Passport For Mac Not Backing Up

Apparently, most hard drives not showing up issues are caused by unsafe ejection and sudden power outage. In order to keep your WD My Passport for Mac in good condition, you should pay attention to:

My Passport For Mac Files Not Showing Up

• Make sure that your WD My Passport doesn't become physically damaged.
• Always safely and properly eject the WD My Passport for Mac drive after using it.
• Don't just unplug the USB cable, on the contrary, unmount your drive by right-clicking (control-click) on the icon on the Desktop or in the Finder and choose 'Eject'.
• Properly use WD software like WD Drive Utilities, WD Backup software ( to back up important files to your My Passport drive), and WD Discovery ( to organize and share your files to the My Passport drive to backup your online social life).

Final thoughts

Actually, My Passport for Mac hard drives are just like other external hard drives, which may not show up after connecting to a Mac. This article offers a full guide to help you fix the WD drive not showing up issue in different situations. It's worth mentioning again that once this issue happens, rescue files from your WD Passport hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac first, or you'll face permanent data loss.

This page is all about unresponsive beeping hard drives, explaining the fault in more detail and exploring the data recovery options available. We use a WD My Passport hard drive as an example but the information on this page applies to any beeping hard drive, not just WD.

“I have a WD My Passport Ultra 2TB portable hard drive, which I have been taking back and forth to a clients site. Last week the drive when plugged into a USB port has begun to make 7 beeps, then 3 beeps followed by 3 beeps and a pause before repeating itself.”

This sounds very much like your My Passport hard drive has suffered some form of mechanical failure. Although portable hard drives are built to be more rugged and withstand more knocks than the 3.5″ hard drives that go into desktop machines, it’s important to know that all HDD hard drives are mechanical devices with moving parts. If they get knocked, dropped or similar they will eventually fail.

The ‘Standard’ Mechanical Failure

When most hard drives develop mechanical failures the result is a repetitive ticking noise that comes from the hard drive when it is first powered on, and the drive will not be detected. This is the hard drive trying to pass a self test before letting the computer take control of it. Each time the drive ticks it is actually resetting the position of it’s read/write head before initiating the self test again. In cases like this it is the actual read write heads of the hard drive that have failed. These will need to be replaced with a working set of heads before the drive will start to function again properly.

Passport For Mac Not Showing Up

The Beeping Hard Drive

In your case there is a complication. Your hard drive may still have head damage, but there is another problem. Beeping hard drives usually indicate one of two things: Either

Beeping Hard Drive from Chris Seeley on Vimeo. Here’s an example of a beeping hard drive that arrived at the Data Clinic offices for data recovery. In this example the beeping is relatively quiet, some hard drives are much louder than this, but the problem are the same.

(1) The read write heads have stuck to the platter surface and this is preventing the hard drive platter from rotating. This is commonly referred to as static friction or ‘stiction’. Retrieving the data from hard drives with stiction involves freeing the heads from the disk surface without damaging either the heads or the platter and is a delicate operation. Many a hard drive’s data has been permanently lost through the the incorrect removal of stiction. Stiction problems should always be handled by skilled data recovery companies, do not let a well intentioned friend or a PC shop like PC World anywhere near a hard drive with stiction.

(2) The knock or fall has caused the motor inside the hard drive that rotates the platter to seize or become stuck. This used to be a very common problem with Toshiba laptop (2.5″) hard drives several years ago and bizarrely placing the hard drive on it’s side and starting the drive up would often relieve the problem. These days it’s not so easy. Depending on the model of hard drive there are two options, either replacing the spindle motor, or swapping the platters to another hard drive. Both these options are extremely difficult procedures. In the UK, Data Clinic and a couple of other companies are the only one’s that have the capability of doing this. Once again, don’t let a well meaning friend, local IT ‘expert’ or computer shop anywhere near a hard drive with a problem like this.

More information on mechanical hard drive faults can be found on this web site here and in a Q&A here.

Unresponsive Hard Drive? – Need Help?

If you have a hard drive that has stopped working for any reason and you want to get the data off of it, give us a call or fill out the enquiry form to your right. We’ll get straight back to you, or find your nearest Data Clinic data recovery location instead.