How to Solve External Hard Drive is not Showing Up in Mac?
30 July 2019Jennifer Thatcher Technology Manager of Test Dept.
Summary
Mac is highly integrated, with many unchangeable parts. Many people prefer to use an external hard drive when the memory isn’t enough but they may encounter that the external hard drive isn’t recognized or showing up. How to solve if it happens in your Mac? How to recover data from a formatted hard drive? This essay will tell you all.
External hard drive is a device that uses magnetic storage to store data. How if the external hard drive is not showing up in Mac? Here are some troubleshooting tips!
Many problems can cause the external hard drive not to be recognized in Mac. The following steps can help you basically troubleshoot.
1. Check whether the drive is plugged in correctly.
2. Check whether the drive has power supply.
3. Check whether the USB cable has been frayed.
4. Restart you Mac. Maybe it is only system crash.
5. Change to a different USB port. It may be a port issue.
6. Try the drive in Windows. The format of the drive may be received by Windows, not Mac.
If you have carried out all these steps, and the external hard drive is still not showing up in Mac, the problem could be caused by the drive itself: the drive has been damaged; the format is not recognized; or the drive hasn’t been mounted in Mac yet. Here are some solutions to solve these problems.
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③ In the left sidebar, select your target external hard drive.
④ If the drive is there, check the volume group. If the volume is not there, click on the [Mount] button at the top.
⑤ If you Mac has mounted the drive, the option [Unmount] will be displayed instead.
2. Check External Hard Drive Format
If your drive is NTFS format, it cannot be recognized by Mac. Please check whether your drive is NTFS.
① Click Mac menu at the top-left, then select [About This Mac].
② In the tab [Overview], enter [System Report].
③ Then at the left sidebar, click [Storage] to select your target drive.
④ Then view the format in [File System] in the main screen.
⑤ If it is NTFS, open [Disk Utility] and select the target external hard drive. Then click [Erase].
⑥ In the following box, select the target format in [Format] and click [Erase]. The drive will change to the format you select.
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3. First Aid for External Hard Drive
The Mac internal tool can verify and fix errors for files, applications and drives.
① Open Lauchpad> Autres> Disk Utility.
② Select the target drive at the left sidebar, the click [First Aid] at the top.
③ In the pop-up box, click [Run] to check the volume for errors. It will then fix the errors if necessary.
When these three solutions fails, the hard drive may be damaged. It is suggested to send it to mend.
How to Recover Data within Unreadable Hard Drive in MacOS?
