External hard drive not showing up on my MacBook Pro

[SNGX1275]

I don't know that I can help outside of what I have already said in this thread.. perhaps someone else will come along with some additional advice.

I guess I have one thing to say, if it is a western digital drive, check on their site to see if there is a Mac update for it. Suppose its worth checking the manufacturers site for any updates even if it isn't a WD.

 

[donggroo]

My harddrive wont work too. and in the disk utility it shows it as an internal drive > < I have everything stored in it, how do I recover this?

 

[faculae]

This was a super helpful thread thanks so much.

 

[Avavalerie]

Firstly thank you very much SNGX1275 for all your help.

OK! I am having the same issue as most people here.

It shows up in Disk Utility and now I am attempting to repair it now.

It says there is:
Invalid key length??
Invalid sibling link...??

And then that the disk cannot be repaired... (check out the screen shot).

I have used this WD drive with my Macbook previously, why now is it not working and am possibly going to loose a lot of my data because I have to reformat the disk??

 

[SNGX1275]

Avavalerie - I have not ran into that issue myself. However, I did some checking and came across this link which has some suggestions: http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070204093925888 (read the comments too)

 

[Kenlow]

If it shows up I would have thought there would be a mount point to click.. So unfortunately I don't have an answer. Have you tried the drive on another computer? Windows computers likely won't be able to read it though, so best to try on a different Mac.

I have the similar problem and good thing is my hardrive is showing in Disk utility but wen I opt : repair disk it says these (see pic uploaded) wat I get and nutin happens after that - I just need ur help to retrieve my important files n I can then format the HD

 

[SNGX1275]

I would try and connect that to a Windows computer to see what happens. Doesn't appear OS X can deal with fixing it (FAT32 isn't really something OS X does - it just supports it).

Just for fun, I would click Verify disk (as opposed to repair) and see what it returns.

Also instead of doing ctrl-apple-4 and screenshotting the entire screen, you can do ctrl-apple-3 and then draw a box around the area you want to capture.

 

[Kenlow]

Hi
Thanks for that screen shot shortcut - wen I connect on a PC it shows and disconnects automatically and this hard rive was formatted on mac so pc doesnt recognise it usually - please help if there is a way to solve this here on Mac

 

[SNGX1275]

In your screenshot it indicates it is formatted as FAT. FAT almost always means FAT32 when it is displayed that way with a 'modern' hard drive in OS X. FAT32 is more a DOS/Windows file system, OS X (nor Mac OS prior to OS X) did not use that although it can read and write to it. So what I'm saying is, Windows can read (and is just as good or better with that file system than OS X) and write to that format.

I don't know of any way to fix it. There may well be some good free utilities for repairing disks on OS X but I don't know any off hand (I guess Tech Tool Pro, although not free). You could attach it back to a PC and see if you can get any diagnostic information from something like SeaTools. Or use some Windows recovery programs. Alternatively you can venture into the world of Linux/UNIX and see if there are any things you could install to do it through the terminal on OS X - but I think your best shot here is to use some Windows software to deal with it.

 

[Guest]

Also in the bottom there is a Mount Point and then something in blue. Click that.

Thank you very much for your help! Your advice was right on.

 

[Guest]

If it isn't showing up in Disk Utility then that is not good. Hard drives just die sometimes, nothing you can do about it. Which is why you should never have only 1 copy of important data.

I have the same problem with my mac. The hard drive is brand new and Mac is unable to detect on disk utility.

 

[Guest]

Hello
I have read all the all of your conversation and am having the same problem and I could not find way to get back my important data,can you please tell me?

 

[Guest]

Same problem. The external drive is not showing up in disk utility. I've tried to read the thread but I cant understand all the computer language lol. Please tell me my Hard drive is not dead.

 

[SNGX1275]

^ Try it on another computer? If it isn't showing up there that isn't good. You could open up the enclosure, remove the disk, and put it in an external dock and try it that way.

 

[Miraaaa]

To SNG,

I didn't really get much of what you said but I tried my best to do as you instructed, and it worked!! Although I had to do it a bit differently because your instructions were made in 2012, and it's 2015 already, so, of course, changes were made. Still, it helped a lot, I certainly cannot lose my files in my external hard disk. Thank you!!

--Mira

 

[elisaxm]

Hi, SNGX 1275
I had the same problem, and the shows as follows

 

[SNGX1275]

What happens if you select the drive itself and try the repair rather than the partition? Probably nothing different, but worth checking. Unfortunately I don't know any free utilities other than Disk Utility to handle problems for disks with mac file systems.

 

[elisaxm]

@SNGX1275
Many thanks for your reply.
If I select the drive itself, the Disk Utility shows it seems ok. I have attached my screen capture below.

 

[ebaldasaro]

I'm having a similar issue: El Capitan style. 1TB External Seagate hard drive appears in Disk Utility but I can't access it. It also says that it is completely full with content categorized as "Other", which is false. Anyone able to get to the bottom of this? Attached is the dialogue when I run First Aid on EBHD.

 

[SNGX1275]

@ebaldasaro - select that drive again and click on the info button (top right button in disk utility window).

 

[Napushi]

@SNGX1275 I'm having the same problem as elisaxm my external hardrive is showing up in disk utilities but wont show on my desktop. This occurred because I accidentally erased it from time machine. Please help.