I just bought a new MacBook Pro to replace my old 2009 model. For some strange reason, the external Western Digital Passport Drive I've used for Time Machine on my old Mac doesn't seem to work on the new one.
No icon shows up on the desktop. Disk Utilities doesn't show the disk. I've tried it in all three USB ports. No luck.
It sometimes shows up in system reports. When I plug the drive into a USB port, I get information from the Console App:
9/16/14 9:32:13.000 PM kernel[0]: The USB device Apple Internal Keyboard / Trackpad (Port 5 of Hub at 0x14000000) may have caused a wake by issuing a remote wakeup (2)
Dead Drive? No, it works just fine on my older MacBook Pro 2009 model.
The only thing I can think of is that my older model had USB 2 ports while the newer Mac uses USB 3 ports. The port on my drive is a USB 3 port. Maybe formatting the drive via USB 2 makes it impossible to use for USB 3?
One More Thing…
I didn't mention this earlier because I forgot. Whoops.
The drive is encrypted, and I need a password to open it. On my old MacBook, if I hold down the option key while booting, I can put in a password for the drive, and I see the various partitions (There is the TimeMachine partition, a Yosemite Beta partition, and a Yosemite Emergency Boot Partition).
If I put this on my 2009 MacBook Pro, it simply shows up. If I put this on my wife's iMac (2012), I have to put in the password, but it mounts fine.
On my new MacBook Pro, I don't see it (or am I offered an option to enter a password) if I hold down the option key when I boot the system.
Also, a question came up about the OS:
The old MacBook is running a beta of Yosemite. It was running Mavericks and it would be the same release and version of the one on the new MacBook Pro. However, the drive crashed, and I was forced to initialize and format, and install Yosemite since that's the only emergency boot item I had.
It's the reason I decided I needed a new MacBook Pro. The new MacBook Pro and my wife's iMac are both running the same version of Mavericks. The old MacBook Pro was running the same version of Mavericks and using the WD disk before it crashed.
This isn't a terrible emergency. I had put my Documents folder on Dropbox, so all of my documents were backed up to Dropbox. Other docs were in iCloud. Almost all of my apps were from the Mac App store (except for some open source tools). My mail is IMAP. The only thing on the WD I didn't have were iPhotos that weren't in iCloud. (Which makes me wonder if Time Machine is still all that important).
Best Answer
Are both MacBooks running the same version of Mavericks? WD had a fiasco with their applications, kernel extensions, etc. being incompatible with Mavericks, which led to massive customer data loss. You might need to update the drive's firmware and erase every trace of WD SmartWare, etc. on the drive and possibly even on the new MacBook, as their crapware can self-install in some instances.