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[FBz]

Not that I would ever have on of these drives… but someone has a problem and I thought that the brain trust here my have a tried and true (simple & straightforward / ha-ha) data recovery approach for this drive…

I have a 2TB external Western Digital Western Digital My Passport Ultra that I've used for Time Machine backups among other things for several years. It also has the most up-to-date version of my music library.

The other night I connected it to my MacBook and it was working fine. I left it connected and put the computer to sleep while I did some other things, it when I went back to it, the drive showed on the desktop, but all that I got when I clicked on it was a "loading" message. It wouldn't eject so I finally used Force Eject. But remounting only resulted in more of the same, even after a restart, and using a different USB cable.

[Greystash]

I've experienced this several times on early OSX/9 if the drive was unmounted improperly (sometimes happens on sleep). The thing that has always fixed this for me was plugging it into another computer with a different OSX (often a newer version) e.g. going from 10.4/or OS9 to 10.11. After it mounts I immediately run first aid within Disk Utility and that usually fixes it. Each time this happens I am reminded to make a full second backup!

Edit: Some versions of OSX hate drives that have lots of folders with custom icons added. For me Sierra and High Sierra would grind to a halt every time I plugged in one specific HD that has had the same format/file structure since Snow Leopard. I checked activity monitor and there was a process called something like 'iconservicesagent' (I can't remember) that would encounter some type of memory leak and would get up to 5+ Gigabytes memory usage and keep increasing unless I killed that process or removed the drive. They could try opening activity monitor and see if they are seeing the same thing. Killing that process was a temporary fix and it would always come back. My only solution was to not use those systems..

[FBz]

Thanks Greystash. I'll pass that along!