WD external drive suddenly bonks on my Mac

Whenever I connect my WD1600XMS (a 160gb 2.5″ USB-powered external drive) to my Mac, it now takes 10+ minutes for it to mount, and even then it only mounts after some prodding. I initially formatted the drive using my Mac (FAT32), but have since used it many times back-and-forth between my Mac and PC. After only a week of owning the thing the drive has become unusable from my Mac, but is fine on my PC.

Immediately after connecting the drive I see the following error on the console:

Nov 4 14:43:47 WeeMonkie diskarbitrationd[40]: unable to mount /dev/disk1s1 (status code 0x00000047).

The drive light then flashes for about 5 minutes, and then the drive’s status information appears in Apple System Profiler:

USB High-Speed Bus:

Host Controller Location: Built In USB
Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBEHCI
PCI Device ID: 0x00e0
PCI Revision ID: 0x0004
PCI Vendor ID: 0x1033
Bus Number: 0x5b

External HDD:

Removable Media: No
Detachable Drive: Yes
BSD Name: disk1
Version: 1.04
Bus Power (mA): 500
Speed: Up to 480 Mb/sec
Manufacturer: Western Digital
OS9 Drivers: No
Product ID: 0x0702
Serial Number: xxx
Vendor ID: 0x1058

If I then refresh Apple System Profiler, the drive lights flash for another 5 minutes and then the drive finally appears on the desktop.

There’s only about 20gb of data on the drive, but there are a ton of files… Does MacOS suck at handling FAT32? Is it trying to cache the entire file table before it mounts the disc?

One Reply to “WD external drive suddenly bonks on my Mac”

Leave a Reply