Hello everyone! I have been sent an WD Elements external hard drive with data on it which I have been unable to access.
I have used the cable provided and connected it directly into my 2018 Mac mini USB A socket. Once plugged in to the power, I hear the disk spinning and it is not automatically showing up on my desktop like my other external devices are.
I have attached some photos which I am hoping a trained eye/mind will spot the anomaly. Please ask any questions which will help troubleshoot. Thank you.
Anyways, if your disk happens to be ExFAT, and you remember improperly removing the disk the last time you used it, chances are, fsck is holding it hostage (metaphorically, of course). fsck is trying to repair the disk, but it will stall forever, so you want to launch Disk Utility, and the Terminal. Try to mount the disk, and switch to Terminal and write sudo pkill -f fsck . The disk will mount in read-only mode, and from there, you can repair it with First Aid in Disk Utility. This won’t work for non-ExFat drives, as macOS manages them differently.
I dealt with a similar issue with a WD external drive several months ago. In my case I was not able to log on to it with my WD credentials.
If you think the log in is failing, WD has them set up where the disc itself is not encrypted so if you remove the casing and access the disc directly, you should be able to just download the data from the disk.
