external drive not showing up in disk utility

Once you know the formatting, you can find a way to mount a drive with that formatting on your Mac. If the format is not readable by macOS, the system might describe is as “uninitialized.” This just means the Mac can’t understand the system, not that the drive is blank. In Terminal, run diskutil info disk3, using the disk number from diskutil list. In Disk Utility, it can be found underneath the drive’s name with the disk selected in the left pane. There are a couple of places you can find the formatting of a disk: Do not press this button unless you want to erase the disk.

This will erase the disk and reformat it as a format that macOS can read. If your Mac cannot understand the formatting of the drives, it may attempt to initialize them.

Your Mac needs to support the hard drive’s formatting. Check Formattingįormatting describes how the data is organized on the disk. If the format is not fully compatible with macOS, like NTFS, then the drives may be mounted as read-only. If the partition is mountable and readable, it will be mounted. Open Terminal from “/Application/Utilities.”Ģ. Using the diskutil Terminal command, you can get slightly more insight into your disk mounting than Disk Utility may provide, sometimes showing drives that are hidden from Disk Utility for various reasons.ġ. Right-click on the greyed-out volume you want to mount in the drawer on the left and choose the “Mount” option in the context menu. The descriptions can be cryptic, but normally manufacturer name and size will help you locate your target drive.ģ. Look at the drawer on the left of the application for a description of your drive. Open Disk Utility, found in “/Applications/Utilities”Ģ. But sometimes all it takes is a quick tap of the Mount option to get things working.ġ. The disk formatting might be corrupt or unsupported by the Mac, preventing it from mounting properly. However, a failure to mount is sometimes for a good reason. Mounting is the last step between you and your data. It’s possible for a drive to be connected to your Mac and for the operating system to notice the drive but not mount it. Check Disk Utilityĭisk Utility will list drives both mounted and unmounted. If possible, use good, known hardware, like a USB cable that you recently used to successfully connect a device previously. If there’s a light on the drive, is it turning on? If it’s a spinning disk, do you feel the drive spinning through the hard drive’s case? Try a different port and different cable to confirm that these are not issues. Most problems with drives on a Mac are caused by a poor connection, so the first step to troubleshooting the problem is to ensure your drive is actually connected to your Mac properly.

External drive not showing up in disk utility