For the last week or so, Apple’s Time Machine has been failing to back up to my five year old WD 1 TB My Passport. Thinking that a drive could be flaky after 5 years, yesterday I bought from Best Buy a new WD 2 TB My Passport to replace it. My late 2020 Apple Silicon MacBook Air, running the latest macOS 12, has only USB-C ports.
Below are the steps I did. Did I do anything wrong at the beginning? What should I do now?
• Connected the new WD Passport to one of the two USB-A ports on my USB-C to USB-A adapter. The drive mounted and I saw two software installers, one for Windows and one for Mac.
• Did not install the software because I thought it was not needed and might interfere with my intended use as a Time Machine backup.
• Launched Disk Utility and told it to Erase and format as a APFS volume, since this is what Apple now recommends for Time Machine. Disk Utiltiy indicated indeterminate progress for about 15 minutes, finally indicating that the reformatting failed, and furthermore that re-mounting failed.
• Tried to get the disk to mount using these instructions from WD, but of course I still used my USB-C to USB-A adapter. Result: Drive does not appear in Disk Utility.
• Connected to an older Mac with USB-A ports. Result: Drive does not appear in Disk Utility.
• Re-tried it on the newer Mac. The drive did appear in Disk Utility but attempting to format it indicated failure, much more quickly this time, after a few seconds.
• Tried again on the older Mac. Result: Drive does not appear in Disk Utility.
• Tried again on the newer Mac: Result: Drive does not appear in Disk Utility.
• Tried on a third Mac, a 2020 MacBook Pro running macOS 11. Result: Drive does not appear in Disk Utility.
• Tried it on an old Windows XP laptop with no internet connection. Result: After several minutes, the New Hardware wizard appeared, but it seems it could not find a driver that it liked and as a result the disk was not mounted.
One more thing: During the last few steps, the drive makes a chirping sound every few seconds when connected to any computer.
