Macbook will not recognize My Passport external Drive

[John Crow]

I recently purchased a WD My Passport External Hard Drive which initially worked quite well for a few weeks. The macbook has stopped recognizing it as well as all other thumb drives yet my printer which uses a usb connection in the same port will work-- also the hard drive operates perfectly well on my mac desktop computer---any suggestions would be helpful--i would be considered a computer novice so if it could be kept as low key as possible it would be appreciated, Thank you JohnC

 

[oldscribe]

Hi,

You could try this, first connect the external drive.

1. Open Disk Utility choose Go > Utilities to find it.
2. Check to see if you can find the hard drive in the list on the left.
3. If you can see the hard drive, check underneath it for a volume. If it is present it will be greyed out.
4. Highlight the volume and click the Mount icon.

Now open a Finder window and check under Devices to see the mounted hard drive.