- Apple Macbook External Hard Drive
- Macbook Pro External Hard Drive Not Showing Up
- Macbook External Hard Drive Not Showing Up
Should you have an ' external drive not showing up on Mac ' issue to manage, it is often due to corrupted system settings instead of an issue with your media. You might even have a faulty cord contributing to the problem! Reasons Why External Hard Drives Aren't Showing Up on Mac. Check Apple's Disk Utility to see if an external drive is showing up. Disk Utility is within System Preferences, or you can find it using Spotlight. If it is visible, then click the option to Mount, which should make it visible on the desktop and in the External Drives option in the Finder menu.
Best Workarounds To Fix An External Disk Drive That Refuses To Show Up On A Mac. Walk through the steps, and hopefully, you will be able to fix the problem that makes your external drive not show up on your Mac. Check System Information. It is important to check System Information & see which USB devices are connected to your Mac. In addition, a backup program designed for the Mac is generally not able to restore to a Windows PC. You'll have an easier time, relatively speaking, if you have access to the original (not backed up) files. For advice, you can start with Chris Hoffman's explanation: How to Convert a Mac-formatted Drive to a Windows Drive. You have to 'partition the hard drive.' Click 'GO' in the menu bar, then 'Utilities', then double click on 'Disk Utility', select the 'Seagate' icon at the left (it doesn't matter which one), select 'erase' top right, and under 'Volume Format', select 'Mac OS Extended.'
Last Updated on April 11, 2020
There comes a time when your Mac system doesn't simply recognize the external drive that you try to connect. Many Mac users have been asking the same question in various forum sites as they are not allowed to view the contents of the external hard drive. In this article, we will be showing you the ways to fix Mac doesn't recognize external hard drive error.
Whenever you try to connect an external drive to your Mac system running on any version of the macOS, your Mac system can't find the attached drive. You may not even find out in the utility section. There could be several reasons for this issue. We have tried to enlist all the possible solutions with which you can easily fix this external drive connection issues on a Mac system.
Methods to Solve Mac Doesn't Recognize External Drive Issue
1. Check the USB Connectivity
The most common and simplest method to fix the external drive not connecting issue on a Mac system is you haven't connected the external drive properly to your system. Try to re-connect it and make sure that the USB port is well-cleaned and the hard drive's cable is plugged in properly.
2. Enable External Hard Drive Visibility
If you have recently updated your Mac system to macOS Mojave then you have to manually enable the visibility of the external hard drive on your Mac system. To do so, follow these below given steps and enable it. You can try out the same method on an older version of macOS.
Step 1: Go to Finder and then select the Preferences option and then General tab.
Step 2: Show these items on the desktop, you will see Hard disks and external disks options. You need to select the checkboxes from this option to enable this service.
Step 3: Once you enabled it, whenever you connect an external drive to your system, it will be showed up on the desktop.
3. Repair External Drives
You can fix this issue by simply trying out the repair option of an external drive. The following steps will show you how you can repair the external drives by using the Utility section.
Step 1: Go to Mac's Finder and select the Disk Utility option in Applications.
Step 2: If you are able to see the connected hard drive in grey color, simply right-click on to it and select Run First Aid option.
4. Erase/format External Hard Drive
The fourth most common fix to resolve this issue is by erasing the external hard drive. The macOS not recognizing external hard drive issue may result from a corrupted or incompatible file system, so formatting a disk can solve this issue because it will rewrite a new file system on the disk. However, formatting will delete all files as well. Before you proceed to format, using the Mac data recovery software to restore important files first. After that, format it on Mac.
Step 1: Go to Mac's Finder and select the Disk Utility option in Applications.
Step 2: Select the external hard drive from the left side and right-click it.
Step 3: In the context, you choose Erase. Erase is the Mac version's format. Also, you can click on Erase at the tools on the right.
Step 4: You will see a Window asking you to fill in a name and choose Format and Scheme for the external hard drive. Please complete them.
Step 5: Click Erase. After formatting finishes, safely eject the external hard drive and reconnect it to the Mac to use it.
5. Keep your System up-to-date
If your Mac system is not updated to its latest version, then chances of facing such issues are high. Make sure your Mac system is up to date with the latest software and other application updates. Sometimes, bugs present in the installed apps can conflict with external hardware and devices.
To do so, you need to check for the latest update, if there is a new update available for your system, kindly update it to avoid such issues in the future. The following steps will show you how you can check for the new update and how you can update your Mac system with it.
Step 1: Click the Apple icon given at the upper left corner of your Mac system.
Step 2: Select About This Mac option which is the first option from the given menu.
Step 3: From here, select Software update option.
Step 4: Now, your system will search for the new software update. If the software update is available, it will show you the update with the required space and other details.
Step 5: Click on to Software update button, downloading process of the software update will begin itself and your system will be up to date.
Once the system is upgraded, try connecting an external hard drive and it will show up in the Finder section or on the desktop as well.
Final words:
These are the most common and simple methods to fix the external hard drive doesn't recognize issue on a Mac system. Follow the given methods and fix this issue now!
Summary: About why is external hard drive not showing up on Mac and how to fix this issue to access the external drive on Mac. To prevent unnecessary data loss, you can free download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac in macOS Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra and get data off first.
Probably, you connect an external hard drive to Mac but it is not showing up. Don't panic! You can troubleshoot and fix the external hard drive not showing up Mac issue. Don't know where to start? We are here to help.
Take it easy and follow our guide to check the connections, macOS settings, and imperatively, the external hard drive itself. Then, the external hard drive will show up on Mac again.
First of all, let's see why hard drives not working or showing up.
Why is the External Hard Drive Not Showing up on Mac?
Most of the time, Mac not recognizing external hard drives is because of the hard drive corruption and faulty connections. But other factors can make external hard drive invisible on Mac as well.
The causes for external hard drives, USB pen drives, and SD cards not showing up on Mac vary from case to case. Namely, they are:
- The USB cable is broken.
- The USB port is malfunctioned.
- The USB adapter is not working properly.
- The external hard drive is not formatted incorrectly.
- The hardware and software like disk driver need an update.
- The file system of the external hard drive is corrupted.
As a result, you plug the external hard drive into your Mac but nothing happens. It looks like that Mac is not reading your external hard drive. The hard drive won't appear on the desktop or in the Finder. But this doesn't necessarily mean your Mac not recognizing the hard drive.
It's a definite guide to fix the Mac not recognizing external hard drive issue. It includes why and how to make the external hard drive recognized by macOS again. Read more >>
Guide to Fix External Hard Dive Not Showing up on Mac
Then what do you do if your external hard drive is not detected by Mac? To find and access this external hard drive on your Mac, simply follow our step-by-step guide.
1. Check the Connections of the External Hard Drive
External hard drives like Buffalo Ministation, WD, Samsung, Seagate, and Lacie are connected to Mac using USB cables and ports. But if the connection fails, your external drive won't show up on Mac.
So, if Mac not seeing your external hard drive, check if the external hard drive is properly connected by the following steps.
Step 1: Check the power connections
External hard drive requires electricity to light up, spin, and transfer data. So, if the external hard drive is lack of power, it won't show up on Mac. You can do these things to check the power supply.
- 1. For Desktop external hard drives like Seagate Backup plus and WD Elements Desktop, make sure the external hard drive is externally connected to a power socket.
- 2. For portable USB external hard drives, make sure the USB port is not wobbly, dusty, loose, or deformed. If the USB port won't work and can't supply with enough power, you can try another USB port.
If you are working on MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models, two things to notice.
- 1. First, make sure your Mac is not in a low power mode. External hard drives can't work if there is no enough power in the USB port.
- 2. Then, make sure the USB hub and USB-C adapter work if your Mac uses Thunderbolt 3 port. Though an authentic USB Type C adapter is better, it lesses problem if you connect the Thunderbolt portable hard drive for Mac directly to your Mac.
Step 2: Check the other connections
Sometimes, the external hard drive like a Seagate hard drive is not recognized by Mac. Then, you need to check the other parts of connections as well, especially when your external hard drive lights on but is not detected or showing up on Mac.
- Check if the wire of the external hard drive is broken.
- Try to connect it to another Mac or even a PC. Possibly, it's just an incompatible USB driver that stops your removable hard drive working.
- Check the USB port on hard drive enclosure case. Sometimes, the external drive is not showing up due to a problematic SATA connection. So if necessary, you can ask help from specialists to open the external hard drive case and have a check.
After checking the connections, you can see if the second hard drive is detected by your Mac.
2. Check Application That's Incompatible with the External Hard Drive
Chances are that some programs are stopping your external hard drive being loaded. Those incompatible programs could be the USB security app, encryption program, or any antivirus software that you installed recently. In this case, you can try to reboot your Mac in Safe mode, which only runs essential macOS items.
- 1. Restart your Mac (some Mac computers play a startup sound).
- 2. Immediately press and hold the Shift key, and then release the Shift key when you see the progress indicator.
- 3. After the restart, reconnect your external hard drive to the Mac and see if it is recognized.
- If the external hard drive is recognized by macOS in Safe mode, you should start your Mac in normal mode and then uninstall the suspicious programs that you download recently.
3. Check if the Mac is Set to Show Connected External Drives
Sometimes, the external hard drive is not showing up because your Mac is not set to. If you can't see the external hard drive on Mac, you can get Finder to locate the external hard drive. To make external HDD show up on the desktop and in the Finder of macOS Catalina, Mojave, or earlier, the following steps would be helpful.
- Show the external hard drive on the desktop: Go to Finder > Preferences > General tab and select 'External disks' to make external hard drives show on the desktop.
- Show external hard drives in Finder: Go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar and make sure the 'External disks' under 'Locations' is ticked. Then your external hard drive will appear in Finder.
4. Access the External Hard Drive by /Volumes/ Folder
If the external hard drive is not showing up on Mac still, where else you can find the hard drive? In fact, you can try your luck by checking the /Volumes/ folder. Most of the time, Mac will show connected and mounted volumes there.
- 1. Launch Finder and click Go in the top menu bar > Go to folder.
- 2. Then type /Volume/ and hit Enter.
- 3. Then you can see the volumes folder that lists all mounted drives and disk images. If your external hard drive is listed, access the hard drive and get to your files there directly.
5. Check Whether the External HDD Can be Found in Disk Utility
To make sure whether your external hard drive is detected by macOS, you can go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility and check if Mac is picking up the external hard drive.
Note: If your external fusion drive is not showing up on Mac, you can check if it is recognized as two separate drives by macOS in Disk Utility also.
There are two possible circumstances:
- The external hard drive could be showing up in Disk Utility but greyed out.
- The external hard drive doesn't show up in Disk Utility.
Let's take a look at what we can do if the external hard drive is showing up in Disk Utility.
Step 1: Check if the external hard drive is mounted in Disk Utility
If the external hard drive can be found in Disk Utility, it means that your external hard drive is detected by your Mac. But since you can't see and open your hard drive as usual, we need to confirm more information displayed in Disk Utility.
- 1. Expand the View option and choose Show All Devices.
- 2. Find and select the external hard drive that is not showing up on your Mac.
- 3. Choose Mount at the top menu bar.
You may see no partition showing up in Disk Utility but the manufacturer's name like WD and Seagate. This means the partition table (A unit of data describing the partition information on the hard disk) is damaged or lost. As a result, macOS is unable to recognize the external hard drive. In this situation, you're advised to recover important data with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac first, and then reformat this hard drive.
Step 2: Check if the file system of the external hard drive is recognizable
The file system manages how and where data on a storage disk is stored, accessed and managed. So it's crucial to make sure that the file system is not corrupted and it is doing a good job.
To check the file system in Disk Utility: simply select the drive you want to check, and then the disk information, including file system and storage capacity, would be displayed at right.
You could see one of the 4 possible circumstances:
1. The file system of the external HDD is corrupted
The file system could be damaged due to improper ejection or bad sectors. As a result, the disk information is not displayed correctly. And you are unable to mount this external hard drive on Mac. To repair this corrupted external hard drive, First Aid on your Mac is a great disk repair tool to use.
- Step 1: Launch Disk Utility.
- Step 2: Choose the grayed out external hard drive from the left sidebar.
- Step 3: Click the First Aid button on the top and then choose Run to confirm this operation.
If Mac is unable to recognize the external hard drive still or First Aid failed to repair the external hard drive, the file system or some core data is too corrupted to be repaired by First Aid. Here are some error reports you might receive from Disk Utility:
In this case, you have to reformat it to assign a new file system to this hard drive. However, as it was pointed out before, reformatting will clean the external hard drive and erase your data on this drive. If you don't have any backup and don't want to lose the data, you are advised to recover files from the corrupted external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is powerful in hard drive data recovery, especially when your Macintosh hard drive or external hard drive is not recognized on Mac. Face id for macbook pro. It helps you recover lost data from unreadable, unmountable, corrupted, and formatted drives. Except for hard drives, this data recovery software also works with USB flash drives, memory cards, SD cards, pen drives, CF cards, etc.
To recover lost data and reformat the corrupted external hard drive:
- Step 1: Download and install iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on Mac, and then restart the computer.
- When external hard drive is not showing up normally on Mac due to disk corruption, the data on the drive becomes a great concern. To recover and access your files on the unrecognized external hard drive, iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is a handy tool to help.
- Step 2: Scan for lost data on the external hard drive.
- After launching this program, check if you can see the unrecognizable/corrupted external hard drive is listed in the main interface. If you can see it, click on Scan to search for your files on this external hard drive. If not, you need to send it to data recovery lab.
- Step 3: Preview the searching results, choose files you need, and click Recover to get them back.
- When you can't open the external hard drive and access files normally on your Mac, you can use the Preview feature of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to see your files. It helps to make sure that your documents, photos, music files, videos, and emails are in good condition.
- Step 4: Launch Disk Utility and locate the external hard drive from the left sidebar of the window.
- Step 5: Select this unrecognizable external hard drive and click the Erase button.
- Step 6: Complete the related information (name, format, scheme), then click Erase to reformat the problematic external hard drives in Disk Utility.
2. The external HDD is APFS formatted
If your Mac uses macOS 10.12 or earlier but external hard drive is APFS formatted, you are advised to update your macOS so that it can work with the latest file systems, software, as well as some firmware relating to USB peripherals and devices.
To update macOS, you can:
- Step 1: Right-click the Apple logo at top right, and then choose System Preferences.
- Step 2: Find and open Software Update to check for new macOS update.
- Step 3: Back up your important files and follow the wizard to update your operating system.
Free recording and editing software windows 10. 3. The external hard drive is Read-only Windows NTFS formatted
Even though Mac can recognize NTFS drive, you can only read NTFS without write permission. And some times, the external hard drive will not work properly. In this case, do not force the external HDD to mount in read-write mode with 'LABEL=NAME none ntfs rw,auto,nobrowse' in Terminal. Changing 'fstab' is risky and unstable.
Instead, you have two other options:
- If you need to use this NTFS external hard drive both for Mac and PC, you can install an NTFS for Mac program to fix this issue without reformatting.
- If the external hard drive is used only for Mac, you can back up your important files and then reformat it to a compatible file system like HFS, FAT32 or exFAT.
4. The external hard drive is formatted with unrecognizable file system
Mac can't recognize non-native file systems. So, other file systems like Linux EXT3 and EXT4 would not be readable by Mac. In this case, the only solution is to reformat it to make it compatible with your Mac.
Warning: Any operation relating to 'Erase' and 'Format' would wipe files off your storage devices. So make sure you have a copy of the data, or you can recover files from this external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
The solutions above are prepared for external hard drive showing up in Disk Utility on Mac.
Apple Macbook External Hard Drive
6. Check and Fix Hardware Information of the External Hard Drive
Nevertheless, what if the external hard drive is not showing up in Disk Utility at all? It should be some hardware problems that stop the external hard drive showing up on Mac. Don't worry! You can check and repair those problems with the following solutions.
Step 1: Find invisible external hard drive in System Information
If the external hard drive doesn't show up in Disk Utility, you can check if the Mac has detected and recognized its hardware information in System Information: Go to Applications > Utilities > System Information > USB, and then check the external hard drive information.
If you see the external hard drive showing up there but not in Disk Utility, the hard drive may be under repair by macOS. Go and check it the Activity Monitor.
- 1. Click the Launchpad and find the Other folder. Find and open Activity Monitor there.
- 2. Type and search if there is any process named 'fsck_hfs' or something similar. (If your external hard drive is exFAT formatted, then it should be 'fsck_exfat'.)
- 3. Select that task and click the Force a process to quit button at the upper left to stop it. and Then the external hard drive should show up on the desktop of your Mac.
If the parameters of the external hard drive are not recognized correctly or even not recognized, you can move forward.
Step 2: Reset your Mac's NVRAM
NVRAM is helpful to retain the information while power is turned off. If you experience issues related to these settings or others, resetting NVRAM might be helpful to get your Mac to recognize the external hard drive.
- 1. Shut down or reboot your Mac.
- 2. Immediately press these four keys in a sequence: Command + Option + P + R.
- 3. Hold the keys for at least 20 seconds and after you hear the second chime, release the buttons.
- 4. After releasing the keys, your Mac will restart and hopefully your drive will show up.
Step 3: Reset the SMC on your Mac
In certain circumstances, resetting SMC can be a solution because SMC is responsible for lower-level functions like power and hardware.
Note: The method of resetting SMC is varied from models to models, so check and know how to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac.
Let's take resetting SMC of a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro Retina, or MacBook Pro's with an internal non-removable battery as an example:
- 1. Shut down your MacBook Air/MacBook Pro.
- 2. Connect the power adapter to the Mac.
- 3. After your Mac shuts down, press Shift + Control + Option on the left side of the built-in keyboard, then press the power button at the same time. Hold these keys and the power button for 10 seconds.
- 4. Release all keys and the power button at the same time. Then press the power button again to turn on your Mac, which would take a little time.
Step 4: Run Mac diagnostics to detect hardware issues
Macbook Pro External Hard Drive Not Showing Up
Apple Service Diagnostic is a set of diagnostic tools used by technicians to find faults. You can use it to confirm or deny your suspicions. If the external hard drive has been physically damaged, you have to send it to local disk repair center.
- 1. It is advised to disconnect all the external devices except keyboard, mouse and other useful devices.
- 2. Reboot your Mac or you can power on your Mac if it powers off.
- 3. Press and hold D button on your keyboard. Hold the button until you would be asked to choose the language.
- 4. After selecting your language, it will display a progress bar stating Checking your mac.
- 5. After completing the diagnostics, it will suggest you the solutions for the errors diagnosed.
Macbook External Hard Drive Not Showing Up
How to Fix Samsung External SSD Not Working on Apple Silicon M1 Mac?
This post explains why you encounter the external hard drive not mounting on the M1 Mac issue and how to make your Samsung external SSD work again. Read more >>
To sum up
It's relatively complicated to check out why is an external hard drive not showing up, recognized, or detected by macOS. If you worry about data loss in this process, you can recover all important data from the external hard drive first with the assistance of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Moreover, to prevent an external hard drive not showing up issue, it's advised to properly eject or connect your external drives at any time. Besides, always backing up critical files on another drive or in the cloud would help a lot.
• How to recover data from an Apple Silicon M1 Mac
