What to Do When an External Hard Drive Is Working but Not Showing Up on Your Mac

If you're using a Mac, there's an 80% chance that you use an external hard drive for file transfers or data backups. An external drive can be a USB flash drive, SD card, removable disk, HDD, or SSD. Getting back to the topic, many new Mac users wonder how to find an external hard drive on Mac after connecting it. Moreover, some old-school Mac users encounter issues with the external hard drive not showing up on the Mac desktop or Finder. Now, how do you locate an external hard drive that your Mac is not detecting? Worry not. This article will put all your concerns to rest one by one.

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Scenario 1: For New Mac Users – How Do I Find and Locate Drives?

Given that Apple products typically have unique user interfaces, operating systems, and layout displays, new Mac users often find themselves disoriented in their day-to-day tasks. One of the issues they report is not knowing how to locate an external storage device connected to their Mac. As we know, the path to check an external hard drive on Windows lies within the File Explorer under "This PC."

macOS displays external drives in a very different way. Whether you're new to Apple's MacBook or iMac or just want to know how macOS identifies and makes connected drives visible, the following are places where you can look for external disks and volumes on your Mac.

Option 1: In the macOS/Mac OS X desktop environment

When you connect the drive to your Mac, it should appear on your Desktop as an icon labeled USB or Thunderbolt (depending on the type of port you used).

Option 2: In the Finder app

The Finder icon is a smiley face, and it's your portal to all the files, apps, downloads, and drives on your Mac. That's why you can also find connected devices under "Devices" in the Finder.

Scenario 2: External Hard Drive Not Showing Up on Mac

Normally, if the drive is formatted correctly and connected to the Mac, it should show up on the Desktop and in the Finder app. However, plenty of people don't see the drive icon anywhere, which may indicate a problem that requires some fixing to get the Mac to recognize it.

If your Mac isn't showing an external drive that's connected, it can be frustrating since you won't be able to transfer files to and from the drive or use it to back up your data. In most cases, the issue is fixable unless the drive has suffered severe damage due to a fall, water or fire damage, age, or too many bad sectors. Follow this troubleshooting guide, from basic to advanced, to try and resolve the issue.

When your hard drive appears normally on your Mac, try basic checks and repairs first.

- Try another USB port on your Mac to rule out an issue with the port. - Connect your external HDD, USB drive, or SD card to another Mac to see if it shows up. - Unplug all other peripherals connected to your Mac and only keep the external hard drive connected. - Restart your Mac and try reconnecting the external hard drive multiple times. - Enable the setting in Finder to show external devices on the desktop: Open Finder > Select Preferences > Click the General tab. Check the box and enable the "Show external disks on the desktop" option.

Most of the time, you can fix an invisible hard drive on a Mac with basic steps, but some users have more complex issues that require advanced solutions. Don't worry; we'll walk you through them.

1. Repair disk errors using Disk Utility

Whatever the reason for the external hard drive not showing up on your Mac, the built-in Disk Utility app can be very helpful. Try these general steps:

Step 1: Click on Finder in the Dock, then click Applications and find Utilities. Launch Disk Utility from there.

Step 2: One of two things will happen when you open Disk Utility.

1. The "Mount" option should be active and not grayed out. If so, expand the "View" options and select "Show All Devices." Locate your invisible external hard drive and then click the "Mount" button in the top area. Once successfully mounted, you should see the drive in Finder and have access to its files. 2. If the external hard drive is already mounted, only an "Unmount" option will be available. In this case, you'll need to use the "First Aid" option to repair the missing disk on your Mac. Simply select the grayed-out external hard drive from the sidebar on the left, click "First Aid," and then choose "Run." After a while, you'll see the repair results indicating whether the drive was fixed or not.

Fix 2: Format the hard drive with a recognizable file system

To use an external drive effectively on a Mac, you need to format it to a file system compatible with macOS. In our previous article, we discussed the best format for an external hard drive for Mac, learning that NTFS is a file system compatible with Windows but very common on external HDDs and SSDs. If you use an NTFS hard drive on your Mac, it becomes a read-only file system, and you can't modify files on it.

So, when your external drive is correctly connected but not showing up as expected, the issue could be with the file system. In this regard, make sure that the external hard drive's file system is formatted in APFS, HFS+, FAT, or ExFAT. These are the file systems recognizable by macOS.

Since the hard drive with a wrong file system is invisible on Mac, you need to use a PC or some third-party disk formatting tool to format the drive to ExFAT, a file system compatible with both Windows and macOS.

If you want to use the drive only with macOS, you can format the ExFAT drive using Disk Utility's “Erase” option.

Additional Tip: How to Recover Data from an External Hard Drive Not Showing Up on a Mac

Formatting will erase data for the drive to take effect. When dealing with issues on an external hard drive Mac, you might need a Mac Data Recovery solution in several situations.

• Formatted external HDD, USB flash drive, or SD card without backup.
• External hard drive not showing up on Mac desktop with important data inside.
• External hard drive detected but not showing files or folders.

Download Data Recovery Wizard for Mac so you have it ready when you need to recover data from a problematic hard drive.

Step 1: Search for the missing file

Connect the external hard drive to your Mac correctly. Launch the Data Recovery Wizard for Mac tool and select the external hard drive. Then, click “Search Lost Files” to look for lost or deleted files on the external device.

Note: Before data recovery, it is recommended to click “Disk Backup” from the left sidebar and create a backup of the external hard drive to prevent further data loss. After backing up the external hard drive, the software can recover data from the backup of the external hard drive. You can then remove the external hard drive and use it again.

Step 2: Filter and locate the lost file

When the scan is over, all file types will be displayed in the left panel. Select the file type to look for the needed files on the external device.

Step 3: Preview and recover

Preview the files and select the ones you want to restore, then hit the “Restore” button. You can save your data to both local and cloud drives.