I have a Western Digital Elements 1TB external HD, it's been used for the past six years to backup two MacBook Pros with Time Machine. It sits on a shelf, it's never been moved........until the other day when I had to carry it to another room, now when I attach it I get the the message, 'The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer'. It's doesn't appear on the desktop. I can 'see it' with DiskUtility but only the disc not the contents.
This doesn't feel good, any suggestions as to what I can do?
With Disk Utility open, select the drive on the left. Does the physical drive list any volumes below it, indented? Also with the drive selected, choose Get Info and see what it thinks the drive is for capacity. I've seen several drives fail to where they think they are 0 bytes in size. Those can't be repaired because their controller can't access them at all.
Also with the info window open, assuming it has size > 0, what does it list for the partition scheme? Try this in terminal to gather more info for us:
diskutil listhere's an example of my output:
BR164-MACLT-NF:~ virtual1 $ diskutil list
/dev/disk0
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *500.3 GB disk0
1: EFI EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1
2: Apple_CoreStorage 499.4 GB disk0s2
3: Apple_Boot Recovery HD 650.0 MB disk0s3
/dev/disk1
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: Apple_HFS Macintosh HD *499.0 GB disk1
Logical Volume on disk0s2
A29DB02C-5A2C-422B-9A93-3022E82C9CA5
Unencrypted
/dev/disk2
#: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER
0: GUID_partition_scheme *102.4 MB disk2
1: Apple_HFS keys 102.4 MB disk2s1
This shows my physical drive disk0, my core storage volume disk1, and a mounted disk image disk2. I don't have any other drives attached, but if I did they would probably look very similar to disk0.
