Written by
Connie Yang
Summary: This article explores how to fix an external hard drive that's not showing up on Mac Sequoia, Sonoma, Ventura, Monterey, or earlier. Free download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac to recover files from corrupted external hard drives ASAP.
Usually, the connected external hard drive will show up on the Mac desktop or at least on the Finder sidebar. However, it doesn't.
Why is the external hard drive not showing up on Mac? It may result from hidden settings, incorrect connections, system errors, password protection, previous incorrect unplugging, or an unrecognized or incompatible file system.
If you don't know where to start, follow our step-by-step guide. After troubleshooting, you can find and access your external hard drive on your Mac again.
Quick checks if external hard drives not showing up on Mac
Disk Utility is the built-in disk management program that lists the internal hard drive and all your connected external disks.
When the external hard drive is not showing up either on your Mac desktop or on the Finder sidebar, directly go to Disk Utility (Launchpad > Other) for further diagnosis.
① Scenario: The external hard drive shows up in Disk Utility.
Problem: You've accidentally set external disks not to display on the desktop or Finder.
Solution: Modify the Finder settings.
② Scenario: The external hard drive is not showing up in Disk Utility either.
Problem: Mac doesn't recognize the external drive, either due to hardware damage or connection issues.
Solution: Check the connections and the hardware condition of the drive.
③ Scenario: The external hard drive appears in Disk Utility but is greyed out (labeled Not Mounted).
Problem: The drive is corrupted or has any tiny file system errors.
Solution: Manually mount it, run First Aid to check it, or reformat it.
Notably, formatting the external drive will erase all data. It is necessary to rescue your files first before proceeding. Or else, permanent data loss will happen. iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac can help recover files from your unmountable external hard drive. Download it to get back the files now!
Note: Detailed steps of each solution are mentioned below. Move to check them.
Share these quick checks to let more people know how to fix an external hard drive that is not detected, showing up, or recognized on the Mac.
Fix 1. Edit the Finder preferences
The Seagate, Maxtor, WD Element, or Lacie external hard drive is not showing up sometimes because your Mac is not set up to do so.
If you can't find an external drive on a Mac desktop or in Finder, follow these steps to reveal it.
- Go to Finder > Preferences > General tab and select "External disks" to make Mac external hard drives show on the desktop.
- Go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar and make sure the "External disks" under "Locations" is ticked. Then your external hard drive will appear in a Finder window.
- Go to Desktop/Finder and check if your external hard drive appears. If not, download, and install our data recovery app on your Mac, and then check if your external hard drive is showing up within the data recovery software.
If your external hard drive is showing up in the data recovery software, follow the wizard to recover data and then format an external hard drive after the data recovery is complete.
If your external hard drive is not showing up even within our recovery environment, then send it to an expert for evaluation after exhausting any possible solutions below.
If these steps and software help you out of trouble, why don't you share them to help others?
Fix 2. Check if the drive is locked
Perhaps, you've encrypted the external drive with a password before but accidentally ignore the pop-up unlocking box. Therefore, your external disk isn't mounting and not showing up on the Mac desktop or Finder.
You can go to Disk Utility and click the Mount button to let the pop-up window appear again and enter your password to access the drive. Or, you can re-connect the drive to your Mac and enter the password to unlock it.
Fix 3. Reconnect the external drive & restart Mac
If the connection fails, your external hard drive is not detected by your Mac, let alone recognized by macOS, and shows up.
Therefore, if you can't find the external hard drive on your Mac, check to see if the external hard drive is properly connected with the following steps:
- Unplug the external hard drive and wait a moment.
- Restart your Mac
- Slowly and deliberately replug the external hard drive into your Mac.
Now, check if it shows up in your Finder this time. If still not, try the next solution.
Fix 4. Try a different USB cable and port
External hard drives like the Buffalo MiniStation, WD, Samsung, Seagate, and Lacie are connected to Mac via USB cables and ports.
A defective USB cable will block the external drive from establishing a connection with your Mac. Thus, the external hard drive is not showing up on your Mac. You can try another compatible cable and reconnect your external hard disk.
Besides, dirty or loosely connected USB ports can also make a short circuit and external hard drives won't show up on your Mac. If you use a USB hub and USB-C adapter, check if it is healthy.
You can try to connect the external hard drive to another USB port as a comparison test. If the hard disk still does not show up on your Mac, the Mac's USB port, the USB hub or adapter, or the drive is damaged. You can connect your external drive to a different Mac for verification.
Fix 5. Ensure the hard drive cable has sufficient power
Some desktop external hard drives like Seagate Backup Plus and WD Elements Desktop require electricity to light up, spin, and transfer data. Lacking enough power will make the external hard drive not recognized by your Mac.
So, check if they are externally connected to a power socket with its provided power adaptor.
If you are working on MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models, do not be in low-power mode. External hard drives can't work correctly if there is not enough power being supplied to the USB ports.
Fix 6. Check the format compatibility of the drive
Disk Utility displays all the internal and external hard drives detected by your Mac and their basic info. You can open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility to check the format of the external hard drive.
If your external hard drive is formatted with NTFS, continue reading: NTFS External Hard Drives Not Mounting/Working on Mac (Sonoma/Ventura)
Besides, if the external hard drive is formatted with an unrecognizable file system, like Linux EXT3 and EXT4, the only solution is to reformat it to make it compatible with your Mac. Remember to back up your data before erasing.
If your Mac uses macOS 10.12 Sierra or earlier but the external hard drive is APFS (Apple File System) formatted, this could result in Mac not recognizing an external hard drive. You are advised to reformat the drive to Mac OS Extended (HFS+) or update your macOS.
Note: If your external fusion drive is not showing up on Mac, you can check if it is recognized as two separate drives by macOS in Disk Utility.
Fix 7. Manually mount the external hard drive
On Mac, a connected external hard drive is automatically mounted by default. If the external hard drive shows up in Disk Utility but is not mounted, it shows that the drive may have some errors.
You can do some remediation when the OS fails to mount the external disk. That is to mount it manually in Disk Utility:
- Expand the View option in the Disk Utility toolbar and choose Show All Devices.
- Select the external hard drive that is not mounted on your Mac.
- Choose Mount at the top menu bar.
After the drive is mounted, you can go to Finder to access it.
Fix 8. Run First Aid to check the external drive
If this external hard drive is not mounting on Mac even with Disk Utility's Mount action, the drive may be corrupted or have some directory structure issues.
Or, sometimes, you may see no partition showing up in Disk Utility but only the manufacturer's name like WD and Seagate appears.
That means the partition table (A unit of data describing the partition information on the hard disk) is damaged or lost. As a result, macOS is unable to recognize the external hard drive. In this situation, you're advised to run First Aid in Disk Utility to see if it can be repaired.
- Open Disk Utility.
- Choose the grayed-out external disk from the left sidebar.
- Click the First Aid button on the top and then choose Run to confirm this operation.
Fix 9. Reformat your external hard drive
If the external hard drive is not showing up after the force-eject from the Mac or First Aid fails to repair the external hard drive, it means that the drive has serious file system errors. You probably receive some error reports after running First Aid, such as:
file system check exit code is 8
In this case, to fix the external hard drive that's not recognized on Mac, you have to reformat it and assign a fresh file format to the drive. Remember to recover your critical data in advance because reformatting a drive will wipe all data from the hard drive!
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is a powerful tool for hard drive data recovery, sd card recovery, and USB drive recovery. It's also capable of recovering data from unreadable, unmountable, corrupted, and formatted drives.
To recover data and reformat the corrupted/unmounted external hard drive:
Step 1: Download, install, and open iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac on your Mac.
Step 2: Select the unrecognizable/unmounted external hard drive listed in the main interface and click Search for Lost Data to search files on it.
Step 3: After scanning, sort the scanned files by different parameters, preview the search results, choose the files you need, and click Recover to get them back.
Step 4: After successful recovery, open Disk Utility and locate the external hard drive from the left sidebar.
Step 5: Select the external disk and click the Erase button.
Step 6: Give a name for the drive, choose a format, and set GUID Partition Map as the scheme. If you want your drive to be compatible with Windows PC and Mac, exFAT is probably the best option. Then click Erase to finish reformatting.
Fix 10. Force quit fsck in Activity Monitor
If the external hard drive doesn't show up even in Mac Disk Utility, check if the Mac has detected and recognized its hardware information in System Information. Go to Applications > Utilities > System Information > USB. Then, check the external hard drive information.
If you see the external hard drive showing up there but not in Disk Utility, the hard drive may be under repair by macOS. Go and check it in the Mac Task Manager - Activity Monitor.
- Click the Launchpad and find the Other folder. Find and open Activity Monitor there.
- Search in Activity Monitor to see if there is any process named "fsck_hfs" or something similar. (If your external hard drive is exFAT formatted, then it should be "fsck_exfat".)
- Select that task and click the X button at the upper left to force quit it. and Then the external hard drive should show up on the desktop of your Mac.
If the parameters of the external hard drive are not recognized correctly or even not recognized at all, the external hard drive is damaged. You can go to a local repair center for help.
Fix 11. Use Terminal
Terminal is a built-in command-line interface (CLI) application that allows you to interact with macOS using commands. When macOS fails to automatically detect, recognize, mount, and show the external disk, try to use Terminal to see if macOS recognizes it at a lower system level.
- Open Terminal from Launchpad > Other.
- Enter diskutil list to list all the connected disks and extract their basic info.
- Check if it shows like /dev/disk_ (external, physical) from the list of disks. Here disk_ stands by the disk's identifier.
- Enter diskutil eject disk_ to force eject the drive. Replace disk_ with the external drive's identifier
After that, unplug the external drive and then reconnect it to check if macOS recognizes it this time.
Fix 12. Reset NVRAM
Nevertheless, what if the external hard drive is not showing up in Mac's Disk Utility at all? There could be some hardware-related problems that make the external hard drive not show up on Mac. Don't worry! You can check for and repair those problems by resetting NVRAM.
NVRAM is to retain certain information while the power is turned off on your computer. If you experience issues related to these retained settings, resetting NVRAM clears hardware-related settings that may affect external drives. Then, the Mac can recognize the external hard drive again.
- Shut down or reboot your Mac.
- Immediately press these four keys in a sequence: Command + Option + P + R.
- Hold the keys for at least 20 seconds and after you hear the second chime, release the buttons.
- After releasing the keys, your Mac will restart and hopefully, your drive will show up.
Fix 13. Boot your Mac in Safe Mode
Chances are that some programs are preventing your external hard drive from being mounted to your Mac. Those incompatible programs could be a USB security app, encryption program, or any antivirus software that you installed recently.
In this case, you can try to boot into Mac Safe Mode, which only runs essential macOS items.
If Mac recognizes and shows the external drive in Safe Mode, uninstall the apps you've installed recently as they block the appearance of the external disk. If Mac does not show up the external hard drive yet, move to the next fix.
Fix 14. Send the external drive for repair
If your external drive is not showing up on your Mac yet after trying the above checks and fixes, connect a different external hard drive to your Mac.
If it can show up and work, it indicates this unrecognizable external hard drive is defective. You can send it to your local repair center in most cases for an upfront quote.
Video guide to fix external hard drives not showing up on Mac
If you think the above information to fix the external hard drive not showing up or recognized on Mac is too much to deal with, alternatively, you can watch this video to fix the external hard drive not showing up on Mac issue.
Some users find this video more direct and intuitive than a dry text tutorial.
Problem solved? Then share the solutions to help more people!
Why is my external hard drive not showing up on the Mac
Most of the time, a Mac won't recognize external hard drives because the external hard drive may be corrupted, or possibly due to faulty connections. However, other factors can make the external hard drive invisible on your Mac as well.
Here are the most common causes for Mac external hard drives not showing up:
- The USB cable is broken.
- The USB port malfunctioned.
- The USB adapter is not working properly.
- The external hard disk is formatted in an incompatible manner.
- Hardware and software such as the driver for the external need an update.
- The file system of the external hard drive is corrupted.
Reddit discussions on external hard drives not showing up on Mac
External hard drive not showing up on Mac is a common issue. It can be caused by various reasons and the solutions are not the sole, just as what users discuss on Reddit.
If you've tried multiple workarounds but still cannot make the external drive visible on your Mac, you can follow our ways in the following parts.
External Hard Drive not showing up on mac
by u/Gentle_Kenneth_ in techsupport
If the issue goes on, you can contact our support team for more help or discuss it with our tech experts in the iBoysoft forums!
