External Hard Drive Recognized but didn't show up, why?

[AlkanOzturk]

Hey Community,

Yesterday I connected my external hard drive to my macbook pro. I wanted to activate the time machine so I have space on my mac. When the time machine automatically came up I forwarded it to connect it to the Time Machine. When the process started I recognized that mac is completely restarting and formatting the hard drive so I searched for any button to cancel the process because I had lots of files in it.

But there was no button so I separated it by pulling the usb cable. Of course the process stopped but after that I tried to connect the hard drive again. Unfortunately it didn't appear anymore.

The disk utility recognizes the external hard drive but I can't see it on the finder. I also went to preferences on finder and checked the box for external hard drives. Still nothing appeared.

Can anyone please help me?

My Macbook pro is OS X Yosemite Version 10.10.2 and the hdd is WD Elements.
MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014), OS X Yosemite (10.10.2)

 

[Cristy_m]

If you did not eject it you likely fried the drive. You can just pull a drive off when it is being written to because it will fry.

 

[SNGX1275]

No he didn't fry the drive. If hard drives were susceptible to that every computer that wasn't connected to a UPS when the power went out would have dead hard drives.

My guess for what happened instead was it was not formatted as MacOS Journaled (HFS+) or exFAT and without realizing/reading he just clicked through and OS X deleted the partition, created a new one, and formatted it as HFS+. Depending on where in this process this was done sets the stage for where he is at now.

He can try some recovery tools in Windows to get things back. Or he can just accept the mistake and learn from it.

This happened nearly a month ago (I didn't see the post back then I guess), so I'm sure he has moved on from this, either having received help elsewhere, or just accepted the problem and moved on.