External Won't Mount

[Tracy Caffrey]

Hi - 

My Western Digital external drive is not showing up in finder so I went into Disk Utility and it is listed but it's greyed out.  So, I highlighted it and clicked to mount but it won't mount.  I get an error that says "Mount Failed" The disk"My Book" could not be mounted.  Try running First Aid on the disk and then retry mounting" Not sure what to do next as I don't know what running First Aid is . . .is it "verify disk"? Should I do that?

I have tried unplugging and replugging back in and nothing.

Thanks

 

[Tracy Caffrey]

 MAC (Mac 0S X 10.9.4; 3.2 GHX Intel Core i5: 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3)

Is this caused because I haven't updated? I am afraid to update as I have heard about problems then with Photoshop, etc

 

[Tracy Caffrey]

I have  a very, very old mac laptop.  Can i plug it in to that to see if it will mount? Or does that cause issues as well?

[Brian]

On 11/4/2016 at 1:25 AM, Tracy Caffrey said:

Is this caused because I haven't updated? I am afraid to update as I have heard about problems then with Photoshop, etc

You really should upgrade to 10.9.5. That's the last version of Mavericks. When you upgrade to El Capitan, Sierra, etc., that's where you have the problems.

I would plug in the drive that won't mount into your computer using a different USB port first. Have it be the only EHD and see what happens. You could also try plugging the HD into another Mac to see if it will mount, but since it's a 3TB WD My Book, your chances of it being a bad EHD are extremely high. Here are 5 bad WD My Book EHDs from a customer of mine:

 

3TB Hard Drives have very high failure rates, especially ones from Seagate and Western Digital. The reason is that when they first came on the scene, Thailand experienced MAJOR FLOODS which affected all sorts of manufacturing, from cameras to hard drives to computer components, etc. For a time Seagate was making Western Digital Drives and vice-versa as the manufacturing plants we being repaired/rebuilt. 4TB and larger Hard Drives are fine, it's just the 3TB drives that have a history of high failure rates.

That being said, the HD itself could be fine, and you simply have a bad USB port. You could try taking the HD in to a Mom & Pop computer store and see if they can transplant the HD into a new external case. Hopefully this will work, otherwise you are SOL and are looking to send your EHD out for data recovery, which isn't cheap. I'd budget around $1500 for that type of service.