External drive won't mount

[glucke]

Connected external WD My Passport to my mac which is running Catalina 10.15.6 and it is no longer recognised.
Disk Utility shows the drive as Ex FAT32 and unmounted. When I try to enable Mount I get the following error message
Could not mount "My Passport" {Com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 0.}
I have managed to back all the information on the drive to another laptop running Windows 10.
Should I now format the external drive to APFS or FAT32 and hope that the drive is still usable?
I also am not sure if I format to APFS will Windows 10 be able to read and write the drive so that I can copy all the original data back to it?

Hoping that with your collective expertise this problem will be easy to fix.
Regards
Glucke

 

[ferrarr]

Have you restarted the Mac? You can try it both ways, with the drive connected and without the drive connected.

If you want to be able to read and write to the drive from both winOS and macOS, you will need to use exFAT. Also, you may want to change the partition scheme to GUID.

 

[IWT]

also am not sure if I format to APFS will Windows 10 be able to read and write the drive so that I can copy all the original data back to it?

No it won't. Stick to your plan and take heed of Bob's comments re exFAT & GUID partition scheme.

Windows will not recognise any of the Mac-specific filing systems such as Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) aka HFS+; or APFS.

Ian

 

[glucke]

Thanks for the replies. The drive isn't recognised either way, connected at boot up or attached after boot up and it is already formatted Ex FAT.
Not sure what you mean by GUID partition so could you please explain

glucke

 

[IWT]

When you set up a NEW External Drive or one that you can afford to ERASE, attach it to the Mac, then Open Disk Utility (DU) (found in Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.

On the left you will see the Mac's Internal Drive and attached external drives.

Locate your one and Click on the top name of the Drive, not the indent. Then Click on Erase and make the following choices:



My Drive was called Integral Courier Media, as shown. You can choose another name if you wish, then in the boxes below, choose your Format (exFAT) by using the arrowheads and with Scheme, again use the arrowheads to choose GUID Partition Map. The click on Erase.

NB NB NB This will ERASE ALL CONTENT and create a fresh Drive. So you must make sure that you have a copy - presumably on your Windows PC - of the data. Then you copy the data from the PC on to the Fresh Drive and the Mac will read it.

Ian

 

[chscag]

Maybe I'm missing something here..... but I don't believe GUID is used with FAT or exFAT. The partition scheme should be MS DOS. Right??

 

[krs]

Maybe I'm missing something here..... but I don't believe GUID is used with FAT or exFAT. The partition scheme should be MS DOS. Right??

I thought so as well.....
Actually "Master Boot Record" with MS-DOS (FAT) or ExFat.

I always wondered why GUID is even offered as an option in that case.

Quite a while back there was a thread on this forum where someone had set up MS-DOS (FAT) with the GUID partition map and had all sorts of issues with it.

 

[ferrarr]

Maybe I'm missing something here..... but I don't believe GUID is used with FAT or exFAT. The partition scheme should be MS DOS. Right??

Why wouldn't winOS utilize GUID?

FAQs about GUID Partitioning Table disk

Provides a list of frequently asked questions about the GUID Partition Table disk architecture.

support.microsoft.com

 

[krs]

Why wouldn't winOS utilize GUID?

No idea, but Apple doesn't suggest GUID as an option

Format a disk for Windows computers in Disk Utility on Mac

In Disk Utility on your Mac, format a disk that can be used with both Windows computers and Mac computers.

support.apple.com

 

[chscag]

Why wouldn't winOS utilize GUID?

MS DOS, Master Boot Record has traditionally been the partitioning scheme for FAT, FAT-32. MS did change that as your link shows to include the larger partitioning scheme available for exFAT. Previously FAT-32 partition sizes were limited to 4GB. Not any longer with exFAT.

However, I'm not sure it matters for the OP though.

 

[patrickynz]

Is the drive encrypted by BitLocker? It will not be recognized by default for encrypted drive.

 

[krs]

Is the drive encrypted by BitLocker? It will not be recognized by default for encrypted drive.

The OP's first post says the drive is "no longer recognized"
So it was recognized at one point which to me means "BitLocker" or something like that can't be the problem.
But the post doesn't say if the drive was recognized by Catalina or an earlier macOS.
That information would help to identify the problem.

 

[krs]

Have you restarted the Mac? You can try it both ways ??

Read post #4, the OP tried that already almost a week ago.

 

[krs]

Connected external WD My Passport to my mac which is running Catalina 10.15.6 and it is no longer recognised.
Disk Utility shows the drive as Ex FAT32 and unmounted. When I try to enable Mount I get the following error message
Could not mount "My Passport" {Com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 0.}
I have managed to back all the information on the drive to another laptop running Windows 10.
Should I now format the external drive to APFS or FAT32 and hope that the drive is still usable?
I also am not sure if I format to APFS will Windows 10 be able to read and write the drive so that I can copy all the original data back to it?

Hoping that with your collective expertise this problem will be easy to fix.
Regards
Glucke

@glucke - You might get some ideas here what to try:

a lot of my external drives have this err… - Apple Community

discussions.apple.com

 

[glucke]

First my apologies for not responding sooner to all the recommendations from members.
After following the advice offered I was eventually able to back up the drive to my Windows computer (with some exclusion of files which it could not read) This was literally "a one time only offer" to recover any of the data as after this Windows 10 would not read the drive either.
I am now looking to purchase another external drive. This particular drive which failed had work related information on it but I have a large collection of photos on another external drive and I do not want to repeat this scenario.
As always your collective expertise are appreciated.
glucke

 

[krs]

As far as external drives are concerned. I used to buy WD pretty much exclusively and also Toshiba, but switched to Seagate in the last few years.
Main reason was that most of the external drive failures I have had, and there were actually only a few, turned out not to be the actual drive itself, but the USB-SATA bridge in the enclosure.
When I took the failed SATA drive out of the enclosure and either mounted it in a new SATA/USB enclosure or even just a SATA/USB interface, the drive worked fine.
I found out a while back that many of the WD external drive sare no longer SATA drives with a SATA/USB bridge (which was the part that had failed for me in at least three cases), but the drives have a direct USB interface, so when the drive does fail there is no intermediate replacable electronics that could be the cause of the failure.
Seagate still uses SATA drives and a SATA/USB bridge for externals so now I'm using those.
The reliability of the actual spinner drive is pretty much the same between Seagate and WD, but in my experience, that was not the main cause of the failures I had.
Other than that, I decided to not get any external bigger than a 4TB USB powered one and back that up fully.
There is no 100% way to predict a drive failure or partial failure.

I recently also looked at reliability of SSD vs spinner drives expecting SSD's to be more reliable, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

So my recommendation would be Seagate spinner, USB powered, max 4TB and a second one with the same data fully backed up.