How to fix WD My Passport greyed out in Disk Utility?

Hello, I have a 500GB WD My Passport external hard drive which I use on my MacBook Air. Since a few months ago the drive just stopped showing off in Finder. When I opened Disk Utility I could see the drive there as greyed out. But nothing happened when pressing “Mount”. I wish not to lose the information on my drive since there are backups from years back. Please help me with a solution to my problem.

In general, when a stable WD My Passport gets plugged into Mac, the drive will be readily available on the Desktop, Finder, and Disk Utility. Then it is possible to have full read-write access to the WD My Passport. However, there are times when your My Passport for Mac is not showing up in Finder or greyed out in Disk Utility. Why does this happen? It's most likely that the WD My Passport is logically corrupted and the operating system fails to mount it.

WD external hard drive shows up in Disk Utility but won't mount? Don't be upset, this article will throw some light on WD My Passport greyed out in the Disk Utility issue. Also, recovering files from unmountable WD My Passport on Mac is also talked about in this blog.

How to fix WD My Passport greyed out in Disk Utility?

The good news is that your WD My Passport or other external hard drives greyed out in Disk Utility indicates that the drive isn't physically damaged but has some issues with the partition table or some other corruption at the file system level. Thus, Mac built-in utilities are enough to fix WD My Passport for Mac not mounting issue.

Fix 1: Run First Aid to repair the unmounted WD My Passport

Disk Utility's First Aid is a drive diagnostic that can be used to test for defects or problems on a mac. This method is also applicable when you encounter grayed-out folders/files on Mac.

Step 1: Go to Disk Utility (found in the Applications > Utilities folder).

Step 2: Select the unmounted WD My Passport for Mac in Disk Utility.

Step 3: Click First Aid on the top of the window.

Step 4: Click Done when the repair is finished.

Fix 2: Reformat to fix WD My Passport greyed out in Disk Utility

Sometimes, First Aid failed on the WD external hard drive since it has serious logical errors. In this case, reformatting is the most effective solution to bring back the WD My Passport to a normal working state. But this process will erase all data stored on the drive. If the drive contains important files, you should recover lost data from unmountable WD My Passport first.

Step 1: Recover lost data from unmountable WD My Passport

iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery is Mac data recovery software that helps you recover documents, pictures, audio, videos, and emails from unmountable, unreadable, formatted, and corrupted external hard drives, hard drives, USB flash drives, SD cards, etc. It is compatible with macOS 12 Monterey/macOS 11 Big Sur/Catalina 10.15/Mojave 10.14/High Sierra 10.13/10.12 and OS X 10.11/10.10/10.9/10.8/10.7 and works fine on M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max Mac.

Tutorial to recover lost data from unmountable WD My Passport:

1. Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on Mac.

2. Launch iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.

3. Select the unmounted WD My Passport and click the "Next" button to scan all lost data.

4. Preview the search results, choose the files you need, and click "Recover" to get them back.

Step 2: reformat to fix WD My Passport for Mac not mounting

Afterward, you can now courageously proceed to erase your WD My Passport.