Jan 20, 2020 WD Elements For Mac Frequently Asked Questions Why doesn’t My WD Elements drive work on My Mac out of the Box? Your WD Elements drive comes in something called NTFS. NTFS is plug and play on a Windows PC but not quite on a Mac. You can connect up an NTFS Elements drive onto your Mac. And your Mac will see it fine. But you can’t put files on.
Summary: About why is external hard drive not showing up on Mac and how to fix this issue to access the external drive on Mac. To prevent unnecessary data loss, you can free download iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac in macOS Catalina/Mojave/High Sierra and get data off first.
Probably, you connect an external hard drive to Mac but it is not showing up. Don't panic! You can troubleshoot and fix the external hard drive not showing up Mac issue. Don't know where to start? We are here to help.
Take it easy and follow our guide to check the connections, macOS settings, and imperatively, the external hard drive itself. Then, the external hard drive will show up on Mac again.
First of all, let's see why the external hard drive won't show up.
Why is the External Hard Drive Not Showing up on Mac?
Most of the time, Mac not recognizing external hard drives is because of the hard drive corruption and faulty connections. But other factors can make external hard drive invisible on Mac as well.
The causes for external hard drives, USB pen drives, and SD cards not showing up on Mac vary from case to case. Namely, they are:
As a result, you plug the external hard drive into your Mac but nothing happens. It looks like that Mac is not reading your external hard drive. The hard drive won't appear on the desktop or in the Finder. But this doesn't necessarily mean your Mac not recognizing the hard drive.
It's a definite guide to fix the Mac not recognizing external hard drive issue. It includes why and how to make the external hard drive recognized by macOS again. Read more >>
Guide to Fix External Hard Dive Not Showing up on Mac
Then what do you do if your external hard drive is not detected by Mac? To find and access this external hard drive on your Mac, simply follow our step-by-step guide.
1. Check the Connections of the External Hard Drive
External hard drives like Buffalo Ministation, WD, Samsung, Seagate, and Lacie are connected to Mac using USB cables and ports. But if the connection fails, your external drive won't show up on Mac.
So, if Mac not seeing your external hard drive, check if the external hard drive is properly connected by the following steps.
Step 1: Check the power connections
External hard drive requires electricity to light up, spin, and transfer data. So, if the external hard drive is lack of power, it won't show up on Mac. You can do these things to check the power supply.
If you are working on MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models, two things to notice.
Step 2: Check the other connections
Sometimes, the external hard drive like a Seagate hard drive is not recognized by Mac. Then, you need to check the other parts of connections as well, especially when your external hard drive lights on but is not detected or showing up on Mac.
After checking the connections, you can see if the second hard drive is detected by your Mac.
2. Check Application That's Incompatible with the External Hard Drive
Chances are that some programs are stopping your external hard drive being loaded. Those incompatible programs could be the USB security app, encryption program, or any antivirus software that you installed recently. In this case, you can try to reboot your Mac in Safe mode, which only runs essential macOS items.
3. Check if the Mac is Set to Show Connected External Drives
Sometimes, the external hard drive is not showing up because your Mac is not set to. If you can't see the external hard drive on Mac, you can get Finder to locate the external hard drive. To make external HDD show up on the desktop and in the Finder of macOS Catalina, Mojave, or earlier, the following steps would be helpful.
4. Access the External Hard Drive by /Volumes/ Folder
If the external hard drive is not showing up on Mac still, where else you can find the hard drive? In fact, you can try your luck by checking the /Volumes/ folder. Most of the time, Mac will show connected and mounted volumes there.
5. Check Whether the External HDD Can be Found in Disk Utility
To make sure whether your external hard drive is detected by macOS, you can go to Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility and check if Mac is picking up the external hard drive.
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 also.
There are two possible circumstances:
Let's take a look at what we can do if the external hard drive is showing up in Disk Utility.
Step 1: Check if the external hard drive is mounted in Disk Utility
If the external hard drive can be found in Disk Utility, it means that your external hard drive is detected by your Mac. But since you can't see and open your hard drive as usual, we need to confirm more information displayed in Disk Utility.
You may see no partition showing up in Disk Utility but the manufacturer's name like WD and Seagate. This 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 recover important data with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac first, and then reformat this hard drive.
Step 2: Check if the file system of the external hard drive is recognizable
The file system manages how and where data on a storage disk is stored, accessed and managed. So it's crucial to make sure that the file system is not corrupted and it is doing a good job.
To check the file system in Disk Utility: simply select the drive you want to check, and then the disk information, including file system and storage capacity, would be displayed at right.
You could see one of the 4 possible circumstances:
First: The file system of the external HDD is corrupted
The file system could be damaged due to improper ejection or bad sectors. As a result, the disk information is not displayed correctly. And you are unable to mount this external hard drive on Mac. To repair this corrupted external hard drive, First Aid on your Mac is a great disk repair tool to use.
If Mac is unable to recognize the external hard drive still or First Aid failed to repair the external hard drive, the file system or some core data is too corrupted to be repaired by First Aid. Here are some error reports you might receive from Disk Utility:
In this case, you have to reformat it to assign a new file system to this hard drive. However, as it was pointed out before, reformatting will clean the external hard drive and erase your data on this drive. If you don't have any backup and don't want to lose the data, you are advised to recover files from the corrupted external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac is powerful in hard drive data recovery, especially when your Macintosh hard drive or external hard drive is not recognized on Mac. It helps you recover lost data from unreadable, unmountable, corrupted, and formatted drives. Except for hard drives, this data recovery software also works with USB flash drives, memory cards, SD cards, pen drives, CF cards, etc.
To recover lost data and reformat the corrupted external hard drive:
Second: The external HDD is APFS formatted
If your Mac uses macOS 10.12 or earlier but external hard drive is APFS formatted, you are advised to update your macOS so that it can work with the latest file systems, software, as well as some firmware relating to USB peripherals and devices.
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To update macOS, you can:
Third: The external hard drive is Read-only Windows NTFS formatted
Even though Mac can recognize NTFS drive, you can only read NTFS without write permission. And some times, the external hard drive will not work properly. In this case, you have two options:
Fourth: The external hard drive is formatted with unrecognizable file system
Mac can't recognize non-native file systems. So, other file systems like Linux EXT3 and EXT4 would not be readable by Mac. In this case, the only solution is to reformat it to make it compatible with your Mac.
Warning: Any operation relating to 'Erase' and 'Format' would wipe files off your storage devices. So make sure you have a copy of the data, or you can recover files from this external hard drive with iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
The solutions above are prepared for external hard drive showing up in Disk Utility on Mac.
6. Check and Fix Hardware Information of the External Hard Drive
Nevertheless, what if the external hard drive is not showing up in Disk Utility at all? It should be some hardware problems that stop the external hard drive showing up on Mac. Don't worry! You can check and repair those problems with the following solutions.
Step 1: Find invisible external hard drive in System Information
If the external hard drive doesn't show up in Disk Utility, you can check if the Mac has detected and recognized its hardware information in System Information: Go to Applications > Utilities > System Information > USB, and 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 the Activity Monitor.
If the parameters of the external hard drive are not recognized correctly or even not recognized, you can move forward.
Step 2: Reset your Mac's NVRAM
NVRAM is helpful to retain the information while power is turned off. If you experience issues related to these settings or others, resetting NVRAM might be helpful to get your Mac to recognize the external hard drive.
Step 3: Reset the SMC on your Mac
In certain circumstances, resetting SMC can be a solution because SMC is responsible for lower-level functions like power and hardware.
Note: The method of resetting SMC is varied from models to models, so check and know how to reset the System Management Controller (SMC) on your Mac.
Let's take resetting SMC of a MacBook Air, MacBook Pro Retina, or MacBook Pro's with an internal non-removable battery as an example:
Step 4: Run Mac diagnostics to detect hardware issues
Apple Service Diagnostic is a set of diagnostic tools used by technicians to find faults. You can use it to confirm or deny your suspicions. If the external hard drive has been physically damaged, you have to send it to local disk repair center.
To sum up
It's relatively complicated to check out why is an external hard drive not showing up/recognized/detected by macOS. If you worry about data loss in this process, you can recover all important data from the external hard drive first with the assistance of iBoysoft Data Recovery for Mac.
Wd Ntfs For Mac Catalina 2017
Moreover, to prevent an external hard drive not showing up issue, it's advised to properly eject or connect your external drives at any time. Besides, always backing up critical files on another drive or in the cloud would help a lot.
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