My Book Essential not mounting on Mac (El Capitan)

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

Hi there,

My ‘My Book Essential’ no longer mounts on my Mac. I’ve trawled different sites to see the definitive answer to get my MacBook Pro to ‘see’ the HD, however I see a lot of questions but not an answer.

My Book was mounting fine until on of the iOS updates. When opening up Utilities > Disk Utility on Mac I can see the HD however it does not appear in the left hand column.

I have a ton of work which I cannot afford to lose on the HD. I would appreciate a definitive solution to this.

Thanks in advance.

2

Hello,

Have you tried running “First aid” on the drive through the disk utility?

3

I have run first aid and it does not come back with any faults.

I also ran the WD application on it - see attached.

1100×1280 90.1 KB

4

Hi Thomas, I have exactly the same issue, can you tell me how you ran the ‘WD application’ test please

5

Hi you need to download/run the WD Drive Utilities application…

As a heads up someone from WD support had this case as a ticket to give more more support. Unfortunately he couldn’t help - ran a shitload of tests but nothing worked.

Bottom line is I will need to go to a data recovery store to get my data back… which is just f*cking great! Thought WD products were built to last.

6

I had a problem with the drive not mounting. Then it would start appearing and disappearing. I did everything, or so I thought. I reformatted the drives and they were OK for a day. Then after turning my computer off, they starting showing up for 10 seconds only, then disappearing. I found an answer at these forums. Someone said to delete the WD Drive Utilities application from everywhere! People are saying it’s not compatible with the OSX. Maybe you should try it. I uninstalled the WD app from my applications folder. I didn’t even know I had it!

Besides doing the following, I uninstalled the app. It’s working now.

This is the post that’s somewhere else:

FOUND A SOLUTION

At least, it was a solution for me.

I was having this same problem, didn’t happen until I updated to El Capitan

I called apple, and had GREAT support from them, and we found the solution to my problem

There is “wd drive utility” software that would launch upon start up

go here to delete it:

FINDER - GO - COMPUTER - LIBRARY - LaunchDaemons - com.wdc.WDPrivilegedHelper.plist

DELETE THAT FILE

Then, go to

SYSTEM PREFERENCES - USERS & GROUPS - LOGIN ITEMS - UNCHECK WD DRIVE UTILITY

That fixed the porblem for me, had the issue on 2 of my 4TB WD MY BOOKS

So glad that apple helped me solve the problem, props to them! Hope this helps you guys!

7

Thanks for your input.

I have tried the above and it still didn’t work. I even tried a different cable and different USB ports on my computer - however nothing worked.

So back to the original plan of going to a data recovery store.

8

My issue is somewhat related. Have 6 year Essentail foe Mac that stopped working…isn’t recognized by my Mac. Before disposing it I want to erase it but Mac disk utility doesn’t recognize it so cannot erase that way. Short of breaking open the case and dropping the disc into acid any other ideas?