How to Repair an External Hard Drive Greyed out in Disk Utility?

You plug an external hard drive into your Mac as normal, but the external hard drive is not showing up in Mac Finder nor on the desktop this time. So, you launch Disk Utility to check this drive, only to find that the external hard drive is greyed out in Disk Utility. You can calm down first because if you see the external hard drive in Disk Utility with some disk information, your external hard drive at least has no hardware errors. That's to say, you have a great chance to repair it without data loss.

Specifically, you might see one of these in Disk Utility:

The symptoms of hard drive dimmed out in Disk Utility are different from case to case. Therefore, let's first take a closer look at the reasons for this issue before you set about repairing your external hard drive that is faded in Disk Utility.

Table of Contents:

• 1. Why external hard drive greyed out in Disk Utility?
• 2. How to fix when external hard drive greyed out in Disk Utility?
• 3. How to fix when external hard drive won't mount on Mac?
• 4. How to fix when Partition external hard drive greyed out in Disk Utility?
• 5. How to fix when Erase external hard drive greyed out in Disk Utility?
• 6. Conclusion

Why external hard drive greyed out in Disk Utility?

Many users are confronted with this annoying issue and are looking for a feasible solution. However, they have no idea exactly why their external hard drives are greyed out in Disk Utility, just like the user from the forum of MacRumors:

"I've been Googling for solutions for the past seven hours. The thing is, I was about to back up and of course, My External Hard Drive in Disk Utility Is Grayed Out!!! My life lives on this disk. I want to also mention that the computer reads the disk. I know this because it appears in Disk Utility, but it's grayed out. Someone helps me."

Then what could be the cause of this problem?

Some common reasons, including sudden power failure, unsafe ejection, virus attacks could make the disk unrecognizable. What's worse, they may damage the file system or partition table of this drive, resulting in disk corruption. If the file system is corrupted too seriously to be read by the operating system, your external hard drive, for example, WD My Passport will be greyed out in Disk Utility.

After knowing what may make your disk greyed out in Disk Utility, now you can suit the remedy to the case by finding the corresponding solutions in the following part.

Also read: NTFS External Hard Drives Not Mounting/Working on Mac (Sonoma/Ventura)

How to fix when external hard drive greyed out in Disk Utility?

One of the most common appearances you might see is that the external hard drive shows up in Disk Utility but is greyed out in the left sidebar. What you can do in this situation?

Solution 1: : Try to mount the external hard drive manually

Sometimes, your external hard drive is greyed out in Disk Utility just because it was not mounted. Thus, you try to mount this external hard drive in Disk Utility manually. To do this, you can select your external drive and click on the "Mount" button at the upper menu bar. If the hard drive won't mount in Disk Utility still, reboot your Mac and try again.

Solution 2: Update the disk driver and extension

Another practical solution to this issue is to update the necessary drivers and extensions. To update an outdated disk driver, you can simply open your App Store and choose the available one to update.

Or if you receive some errors like "System Extension Blocked", it means a disk driver on your Mac is not working due to the lack of an extension, and you can easily enable this extension to be loaded in "Security and Privacy". After updating the disk driver or extension, you can reboot your Mac, reconnect the external drive to your Mac, and then remount this drive.

How to fix when external hard drive won't mount on Mac?

The external hard drive shows up in gray but won't mount in Disk Utility, even you have tried to manually mount it? Don't worry, you can check the following solutions and see if they can solve your problem.

Solution 1: Repair this external hard drive with First Aid

In some cases, a disk is unmountable and greyed out in Disk Utility because some minor disk errors are stopping your Mac from reading this drive. Fortunately, there is a built-in utility on your Mac called First Aid is able to check and repair such minor file system errors.

Solution 2: Reformat this external hard drive

Suppose First Aid failed on the external hard drive and you still can't open it, your drive is greyed out in Disk Utility because the file system of the drive could be seriously corrupted. Reformatting can fix the file system corruption, but it also will erase all data on it.

Therefore, if you didn't back up data before or this external hard drive is used as a Time Machine backup drive, the safe choice is to recover lost data firstly with reliable data recovery software, like iBoysoft Mac Data Recovery. If data loss is not a hassle for you, you can just skip to reformatting.

iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is professional Mac data recovery software, which can recover lost data from unmountable/formatted/inaccessible external hard drives. It can recover lost data from APFS, HFS+, HFS, FAT32, and exFAT formatted external hard drives, USB drives, flash drives, sd cards, CF cards, memory cards, etc. This software also can undelete documents, pictures, emails, music, etc. from Trash.

It supports Mac OS X 10.11 and later version, and works fine on M2, M1, M1 Pro, and M1 Max Mac.

Step 1: Recover data from corrupted external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac

5. Check the box next to the wanted file and click Recover to save the file to another healthy storage device. 

Step 2: Reformat this external hard drive with Disk Utility

• How to format external hard drives on Mac?

How to fix when Partition external hard drive greyed out in Disk Utility?

It is possible that an external hard drive is greyed out in Disk Utility, so you try to reformat it by re-partitioning it. However, the Partition feature is greyed out as well. How to fix this problem? Well, you have two options to try.

Solution 1: Check if the external hard drive is NTFS formatted

As you probably know, most external drives would be formatted with the Windows NTFS file system by the manufacturer, while the NTFS file system is read-only on Mac computers. That's to say, you can't perform any input operation to this disk, including re-partition.

So have a check if this external disk is a Windows NTFS file system by viewing the disk information directly. If so, you may need an NTFS for Mac driver so that you can rearrange the space of this disk by partitioning it in Disk Utility.

Solution 2: Enable Show All Devices in Disk Utility

What if your external disk is not formatted with NTFS but some other file systems like Mac OS Extend and FAT, how to fix this issue then? Well, it's likely that the Partition option is greyed out in Disk Utility because you select the wrong item.

You can't partition a volume (Even though the Partition option is highlighted for APFS volumes). Instead, you should select the disk drive when you want to partition a disk, and the following steps would be helpful.

How to fix when Erase external hard drive greyed out in Disk Utility?

Another problem you might meet in Disk Utility is that you can erase a disk because the Erase option is greyed out. Usually, it happens when you try to erase an internal drive, which is reasonable because you can't erase the startup disk that you are currently running.

Then if you want to install a new OS, or if you need to erase personal data before you donate your Mac, how can you erase a system volume?

Solution: Erase the disk in macOS Recovery mode

• What to do when Mac Recovery mode not working

Conclusion

However, if your external hard drive is greyed out in Disk Utility, and the disk information and the storage capacity is not even showing up correctly, the disk may die from physical damage. If this is the case, you can try your luck by sending it to a disk repair service.

It will be great if this article has helped you repair the external hard drive that is greyed out in Disk Utility.