Aug 30, 2018 - To start formatting, connect your WD Passport to your Mac; then open “Mac HD” and click “Applications,” “Utilities” and “Disk Utility.” From the Disk Utility window, select the Passport hard drive.

My 'WD 1TB My Passport' external HD recently has major issues. It's HFS+partitioned as 700/300GB, and left plugged into the rear USB2.0 of my 5th Gen Airport Extreme.

I've been accessing it via WiFi for 2 years, backing up all my Videos/Photos and playing movies. Couple days ago the Extreme flashed orange, and the desktop drive icons turned Orange. I used Mac Disk Utility, and the secondary 300gb partition had errors. I erased and reformatted the secondary partition, and then backed-up all my photos using the Flickr up-loader. Today I went to backup my videos, but it mounts maybe 1 out of 3 times, and is too slow to actually bring any files up. I downloaded the WD Mac tool and it failed the tests, as it really doesn't mount. Then I brought it to work and tried the Windows 10 tool, but it doesn't mount nor recognize it, even through Windows 10 does.

Where should I go from here? These video files are precious travel and life videos. I really would like to recover them. Any tips are appreciated!

Click to expand.You might have some luck with which may be able to access the drive even though it won't mount. However, Disk Warrior is expensive and they do not have a trial version to try before buying. A drive that won't mount is very difficult to repair or extract files from so you need to be aware that even Disk Warrior may not work.

The only other alternative is even more expensive and that is to use a drive repair recovery service. That kind of service can run into the hundreds of dollars depending on the size of the drive. OP: I realize this advice doesn't help you now. But for the future.I wouldn't rely on a connection via the Airport for backing up. Instead, I'd connect the backup drive DIRECTLY to the computer (to be backed up), and then use either CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to create a bootable cloned backup of your internal drive. And like matreya advised, two backups are better.

To the matter at-hand: In your original post, are you saying that you -CAN- mount the drive and see the files in Windows 10? If so, get ANOTHER drive, and copy those files posthaste! The name of the game is get the partition mounted ANY way you can, get a second drive, and get the files from it. Click to expand.It's formatted HFS+ so no, Windows cannot see the files. When I plug it into the Mac, the primary partition slowwwwly mounts on the Mac (secondary does not), but it reads too slow to copy any files off. I got Diskwarrior 5, and hit the 'Rebuild' for the Primary partition, and its been sitting for 15+ hours on stage 1, so I just hit Cancel. I was reading that if the disk hardware is malfunctioning (which I think it is), that using something like Disk Warrior to 'Rebuild' the drive isn't the best option, as the damage will get worse as it tries to rebuild.

Bad business!