How to fix the flash drive not showing up in Finder sidebar?

Flash drives are not showing up in the sidebar of the finder. I went into the Finder preferences to check if it was set up to do so, and it is. I've never changed that setting and this is happening all of sudden. External drives still show up on the desktop, and I can navigate to them by searching "/Volumes/Drive". It shows up in Disk utilities just fine. Despite all of this, it just won't show up in the sidebar. I've restarted the computer and did a PRAM clear. The only thing I notice that may have something to do with it is that is taking forever to index in the Spotlight search. Could that be the problem and is there a fix for this?

Best Answered by

Eudora Liu

Answered on Thursday, March 9, 2023

You mentioned you have set the Finder Preference. But have you selected an external disk in the Finder sidebar? Therefore, what you need to do first is to check whether you do the correct settings of your Finder. Here's how:

Insert your flash drive into your Mac/MacBook.
Open Finder > Settings… > Sidebar.
Select External disks under Locations.

After that, check whether the flash drive shows up in the Finder sidebar.

And you referred to that you can see the flash drive in Disk Utility, you can use it to run First Aid and repair your flash drive.

Open Finder > Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility.
Choose the flash drive in the left sidebar.
Click First Aid in the top menu.
Select Run in the pop-up window.

If Disk Utility can detect the problem, it will be fixed automatically. After these steps, you can check if the flash drive shows up in the Finder sidebar.

If you still can't see the flash drive in the Finder sidebar, you can format the flash drive and before that, you need to back up your data.

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