Mac OS X 10.5.8 - WD Essential Drive locked or missing?

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

HI,

I have a My Book Essential 1.5 TB external drive, which I can no longer detect on my MacBook Pro.

Cause?

I wanted to share some photos with my sister who also has a MacBook Pro and so I used the Mac Network setting to share the WD drive wirelessly. It was taking a long time to read and copy the files so we decided to just plug in directly to her PC. Straight off it said something like “can’t initialize” the drive. So I unplugged it an put it back into mine. To  my shock I got the same error after putting it back into my Mac.

Problem:

When I use DIsk Utility nothing appears for the external drive, on either Mac.

I just get a flashing locked button down the bottom.

Details:

She is running Snowleopard OS and I’m running  Mac OS X 10.5.8

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Tim

2

Was it still trying to copy files when you disconnected it from Network sharing?  If so, it’s possible that you corrupted the partition.  However, it should still show up in Disk Utilities as a drive.