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Cannot mount external ssd on new Mac mini, please help

I was copying files from the external SSD to my new Mac mini, and accidentally I disconnected the drive. Now my Mac is refusing to mount the drive. The weird thing is that I can mount the drive on my daughter's PC running Linux. But the Disk Utility app is returning this 'Could not mount Extreme SSD. (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 0.)' error when I try to force the mounting of the drive. Any idea how to fix this issue without reformatting the drive? This drive has the only backup of my files from my PC.

Best Answered by

Rivers Wong

Answered on Tuesday, August 27, 2024

To fix this 'cannot mount external SDD on Mac' issue, you can run First Aid in Disk Utility and manually mount your drive again, or force mount the external SDD in Terminal.

By your description, your external hard drive is not mounting on Mac, and an error message 'Could not mount Extreme SSD. (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error 0.)' pops up when manually mounting the drive in Disk Utility, which may indicate that there are some problems on your drive or macOS.

Since the SSD was functioning well until you accidentally disconnected it, and it can still be mounted successfully on your daughter's Linux computer, there may be a temporary bug on macOS that leads to the unsuccessful mounting. You can restart your Mac, then try to mount your external SSD again.

If restarting your Mac doesn't work, there might be some errors on the external drive. In this situation, you can run First Aid in Disk Utility. First Aid is a built-in disk-checking tool on Mac, and is able to repair some minor errors related to the directory structure of a disk. Here's how to do it:

  1. Connect the external SSD to your Mac computer.
  2. Open Disk Utility, then select the unmounted drive from the left panel.
  3. Click First Aid at the top toolbar, then tap on Run.
  4. Try to mount your external SSD again in the Disk Utility.

If the external drive still can't be mounted after running First Aid, then you can try to force mount it using Terminal. The Mount feature is not exclusive to Disk Utility, you can also implement this feature by running command lines in Terminal:

  1. Make sure the external SSD is connected to your Mac.
  2. Open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal.
  3. Copy and paste the following command into Terminal, then hit Return to show all the drives on Mac. Find the identifier of your external SSD then write it down. 
    diskutil list
  4. Run this command in the Terminal. Here the 'disk1s2' should be replaced with the identifier of your external drive. 
    diskutil mount /dev/disk1s2

Really hope that you can fix this problem with the solutions mentioned above!

Read more: External Hard Drive Not Mounting on Mac Computer, How to Fix?