I plugged in an old WD My Passport external HD (WDBACX0010BBK-00) into my 2020 Macbook Air M1 on Sonoma 14.5, only to find that the disk does not show up on finder. Disk utility shows a WD Virtual CD with minimal capacity, with all the Disk Utility options greyed out as an uninitialised disk.
I tried to mount via diskutil in terminal:
% diskutil mount /dev/disk4
Volume on disk4 failed to mount
If it has a partitioning scheme, use "diskutil mountDisk"
If you think the volume is supported but damaged, try the "readOnly" option
Then to mount the full disk in readonly mode:
% diskutil mountDisk readonly /dev/disk4
Volume(s) mounted successfully
I left it to chew at that for a while, and in that time also got a pop up which read The disk you attached was not readable by this computer. Still nothing could be seen in finder or in the Volumes directory via terminal. However, running diskutil list again, I can see there is a new “slice”, which wasn’t there before (disk4s0) :
% diskutil list
...
/dev/disk4 (external, physical):
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: CD_partition_scheme *36.1 MB disk4
1: CD_ROM_Mode_1 31.5 MB disk4s0
Now in an attempt to understand and (hopefully) recover the data, following the recommendations here in a blogpost by nbalkota in 2013, trying the following:
% sudo gpt recover /dev/disk4
gpt recover: operation not permitted: recover
Why am I not permitted to use recover / how can I get this to run?
