Home > Questions

Didn't eject my external hard drive now it will not reconnect

I just got my MacBook Air, been using a PC up until now. Earlier this morning I plugged in my external hard drive and transferred some music onto my MacBook Air. When I removed my external hard drive I didn't eject it, now when I plug it in my MacBook does not even see it. I tried different hard drives and I can see them. I even tried using that hard drive on my old PC and it works. How do I get my MacBook to recognize the hard drive again? Still new to the whole MacBook experience.

Best Answered by

Eudora Liu

Answered on Monday, April 29, 2024

The easiest way to unmount a drive in Mac is to either just drag a volume into the Trash, use the eject keys, disconnect the drive or use one of the force eject methods.

But if you can't use these ways to eject your drive, you can use Terminal to give help. You can use the following steps to eject your drive.

  1. Open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
  2. Type in the following command to list all your disks.  
    diskutil list
  3. Type in the following command to eject your drive.  
    diskutil unmount /dev/disk1s2

And if you want to mount it on your MacBook, you can use the following commands.diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2

After that, you can check whether your external hard drive ejects from your MacBook safely.

If your MacBook can't recognize the hard drive, you can try the below methods.

  • Check the connections
  • Check Finder settings
  • Check it in System Information
  • Check its partitions
  • Check its file system