WD My book not showing on mac

WD External and Portable SSD External SSD for macOS
1

Hi,

I have a WD My book which I bought 3/4 months ago. Yesterday I was working with it connect to my mac, and I needed to restart the computer as it was crashing. Since then the ssd does not show anymore in my mac.

If I access the WD Discovery app it shows the disk is connect but it doesn’t even show the capacity of the disk as it usually did.

After reading in the internet I suspect the disk is performing some task but I can’t find which in the activity monitor.

Can anyone help me?

2

There are number of reasons why your hard drive, flash drive, USB drive, or SSD might not be showing up. It may have been formatted incorrectly, it may be corrupted, it may have a faulty (or inadequate) cable, or there could be something else. To fix the problem you can try the below methods:

  1. Edit your Preferences under Finder Preference
  2. Check the cable
  3. Try on another Mac and then try on PC
  4. Use Disk Utility for First Aid
  5. Change the Drive format
  6. Try data recovery tool

If above methods won’t help, then try using reliable data recovery tool such as Stellar Data Recovery to recover data from affected drive.

Further, you can also check the below for steps to be followed in each method mentioned above:

Hope it helps!

3

To fix an external hard drive that is not appearing on your Mac, you can modify your Finder configuration by following these steps:

  1. Launch Finder, select Finder from the top menu bar, and open Settings (or Preferences on older macOS versions).
  2. Navigate to the General tab and check the box next to External disks to display connected drives on your main screen.
  3. Switch to the Sidebar tab, look under the Locations section, and ensure External disks is selected so drives appear in your Finder windows.
  4. Return to your desktop to see if the storage device is now visible.

You can also have a deeper understanding of the root causes behind this issue in this comprehensive guide: External Hard Drive Not Showing Up on Mac: Diagnose Before Fixing

4

I’d first check Disk Utility and see whether the WD My Book appears there, even if the volume isn’t mounted. Also try another USB cable/port and restart the Mac with the drive disconnected, then reconnect it. If Disk Utility shows the physical drive but no capacity/partition, avoid initializing or formatting it, especially if the data is important.
To get a detailed guide to fix a WD hard drive not showing up.