Whenever you plug in an external hard drive to your Mac computer, it should show on Finder. If you are unable to recognize the external hard drive on a Mac. This might be an indication of a hard drive being corrupt or faulty. A few other reasons may include unsafe external hard drive removal from multiple devices, virus attacks, system crashes, file system corruption, hardware problems, etc.
The article explains 2 different scenarios of external drives not showing up on Mac.
Case 1: Mac external hard drive is showing up in Disk Utility
Case 2: The external hard drive is not showing up on the Mac disk utility
Before heading to fix the issue of an external hard drive not recognized on a Mac, here are a few basic checks you need to verify that could help you mount the drive on a Mac.
- Check if the drive is receiving adequate power.
- There could be a problem with USB ports, therefore verify the ports by changing the USB ports.
- Make sure there is no fault in the drive cable connection.
- Try restarting your Mac in safe mode.
- Also, you can try using a different Mac device to verify if the problem is in an external drive or macOS.
If you still cannot find your external drive, let’s start with the first scenario: the external hard drive is not recognized on Mac but is mounted in Disk Utility.
Scenario 1: Mac not Recognizing the External Hard Drive
If the Mac external hard drive is not mounting on a desktop or in Finder. The next step is to verify the state of the external hard drive in Disk Utility.
macOS Utility is part of the built-in recovery system of your Mac, from which you can boot into Mac and use its utilities (Disk Utility) to repair certain logical errors on the hard drive.
Note: You can make use of all the below-mentioned methods to solve external hard drives not recognized on Mac if and only if it is mounted in Disk utility.
Solution 1: Fix External Hard Drive Not Recognized on Mac using Disk Utility
If you are using the external drive for the first time on Mac and it is not mounting on your desktop or in Finder, check your preference settings, as they might not be configured to display external hard drives on your desktop.”
Step 1: Go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar/General tab.
Step 2: Select Device > External disks (or you can find external disks under Show these items on the desktop).
Note: This is the easiest method to make an external hard drive mount on a Mac. However, there are chances when Finder stops responding. In such cases, you need to fix the Finder problem and continue with the steps.
If there are any logical errors or corruption in the disk, an external hard disk won’t be recognized on Mac. You can try fixing the external hard drive not recognized on Mac with the First Aid in Disk utility.
Solution 2: The external hard drive not mounting on Mac
The issue that Mac doesn’t recognize the external hard drive could be fixed with Disk Utility under Mac Recovery Mode.
1: Restart your Mac and immediately press and hold the Command + R keys to get into Recovery Mode, release the keys when you see the Apple logo.
2: Select Disk Utility in macOS/Mac OS X Utilities and click Continue
3: Select the external hard drive mounted and run First Aid to check and repair errors in this drive.
What if you have accidentally deleted the Mac HD in the disk utility? Do not worry, click on the given link to fix the issue and recover the data from the Mac drive.
However, if you are unable to recognize the external hard drive on a Mac even after performing all the above-mentioned methods, this might be due to severe corruption in the drive. You can easily solve this by reformatting, as explained in the next solution.
Solution 3: Fix Mac not recognizing external hard drive by reformatting
Note: Reformatting will erase all your data stored on the drive. If you have any important files on the external hard drive, you need to restore data before reformatting. You can recover data using a safe and secure hard drive recovery tool.
Once you are ensured all your important data is recovered from the external hard drive, try fixing a Mac that doesn’t recognize the external hard drive by reformatting it.
1: Launch Disk Utility.
2: Select the Mac not recognized external hard drive from the left part of the window.
3: Click the Erase on the top of the Disk Utility window.
4: Complete the related information like name, format, and scheme, then click Erase.
Reformatting will help you mount the external hard drive on a Mac if it appears in Disk Utility, especially if you encounter the error ‘Disk Utility can’t repair this disk.’
What if the external hard drive is not showing up on Mac in the disk utility? What if your important data is stuck on the external hard disk? how would you recover a corrupt external hard disk?
Before you face a hard situation of data loss from your external drive use the SFWare Data Recovery Software for Mac. The tool is explicitly designed to recover data from all data loss situations from external hard drives including formatting or corruption on the drive. It supports APFS, HFS, HFS+, exFAT, and FAT32 file system drives on all versions of macOS.
Steps to Recover Formatted Data from Unrecognized External Drive on Mac
Download the SFWare Data Recovery Mac on your computer and connect your external drive, launch the application.
- Select Recover Drives from the main screen. Next, the Recover Drive/ Partition Recovery option
- Next, the screen will display all the available drives. Select the Volume and click on the Next option
- Now, select the formatted drive on Mac. The Software initializes its scanning process to reach the drive of each sector.
- After the completion of the process, you can view recoverable files either in Data View or File Type View.
Once the recovery process finishes, you can check each file by previewing them before saving. Later, select and save files on your computer.
Scenario 2: What to do When the External hard drive is not showing up in the Mac Disk Utility
You can make your external hard disk recognizable on Mac Disk Utility by resetting the NVRAM. By trying the basic check explained earlier, the disk utility should be able to show the external drive. however, if you have problems related to the settings controlled by NVRAM or PRAM, resetting NVRAM or PRAM will solve the issue.
Steps to reset NVRAM or PRAM
First, restart your Mac. Press Option + Command + P + R keys together for 20 seconds. Leave the keys if the Mac has started again normally and you hear the second startup sound.
Performing any of the above-mentioned steps, you should be able to recognize your external hard drive on a Mac. If you are still unable to mount the external hard drive on the Mac or Disk utility. The drive may have serious hardware problems that the above-mentioned methods cannot fix. We recommend consulting a local hard drive technician for repairs.
Conclusion
It is always rewarding to have a backup of data as you never know when you might encounter data loss. However, a few manual methods can help you regain access to your external hard drive if it is not recognized on Mac. This article also provides you with a way to recover data from the external hard drives if you fail to mount your external hard drive on a Mac.
SFWare hard drive recovery tool that supports recovery from all kinds of external hard drives including Seagate, Samsung, WD, Transcend, Toshiba, and other external drives.
If you were successful in fixing an external hard drive not recognized on Mac issue with the help of this article. Do let us know in the comment section below.
