External hard drive not mounting on desktop or being accessible - help!!!

Hello,
I use an Iomega 160GB external hardrive to store my iTunes and a load of video files as well as back up to but at the moment I can't get it to mount. It is visible in system profiler but I can't access any of the files. I tried verifying it and repairing it in disk utility but both of these failed. If any of you could help me out I would really appreciate it - I do have another copy of all my files on my iMac at home but i am currently studying in Spain and won't be going back till Christmas so need to get this drive up and running!

welcome to macbook forum.
try to reset PRAM to refresh your macbook port.
check the power adapter, if it comes with it, use it or check if the power adapter still good and supplied the power properly.
connect your external to other mac (you can connect to PC if it formatted as FAT32), if it succedd, back up your data and repair / reformat using that other mac.
Good Luck.

Similar Messages

External Hard Drive not mounting on Desktop

Hello,
I use a 250 gb Lacie external hard drive (firewire) for backup. For the past week, the external hard drive has mostly not been mounting on the desktop.
I don't think it's a power issue, because after turning the unit on both the light indicating power turns on and I can hear the motor operating.
As indicated on the Lacie web site, I went to disk utility in system preferences and repaired disk permissions for my Mac's hard drive volume. That doesn't seem to have made a difference.
Does anyone have any other suggestions as to what I should do?
Thank you,
Manny

Hi gavvx, and a warm welcome to the forums!
Feel free to start a new topic of your own will get more individualized attention, and many more helpers!
It can be hard to sometimes find where to start a New Topic, so here's the link...
http://discussions.apple.com/post!default.jspa?forumID=758
Did you try highlighting them, then the Mount button in Disk Utility?

2 different brand USB external hard drives not mounting- Firewire ok

Hi, first timer here so apologies in advance.
i have to different brand external hard disks and they both show up fine with a firewire connection. the trouble is that i need to use the usb connection and neither show up. (shows up in system profiler though but not disk utility.) why USB if i can use Firewire? I will be using the disk to connect to a Wii console via usb port and the Wii is not recognizing either disk either?
Any ideas on how to get one of these disks to mount by USB?
cables are fine as work with USB only hard disks.
Thanks in advance

Hello Bob,
Thanks for your reply.
Unfortunately it does not show up at all in "disk utility". But appears in System Profiler under USB. This is true of 2 different external hard drives that mount fine with the firewire cables. One is a 3.5 inch and the other is a 2.5 inch portable. The USB cable is not faulty as tested it with another USB peripheral. Now a big believer in coincidences. Am i doing something wrong?
any other thoughts?
thanks again

External hard drive not mounting

external hard drive not mounting

I fixed mine by uninstalling the software that came with the harddrive such as Tuxera and reinstalled it now myharddrive works again and i did not have to delete the harddrive and reformat it.
I tried a lot like reseting the Pram And connecting other harddrives but by unstalling the original software it works all over again. I hope this works for you because i was getting pretty frustrated myself.
Im running a 2012 macbook pro with 10.9.3
boom mind blown

Lacie firewire 800 external hard drive not mounting in mac os 10.4.8

I have a pm g5 Dual 2ghz system ,i have connected an firewire 800 lacie 1tb external hard drive to the system,now the problem is it is not mounting on the desktop shows in the diskutility repaired the disk say's disk volume ok any way to mount the external hd on the desktop

Hi Veena, Welcome to Apple Discussions.
And you've tried choosing the volume and pressing the "Mount " icon on the tool bar of Disk Utility?
Have you shut down your Mac and disconnected your firewire cable from both ends and let it sit about ten minutes then reconnect and try. Also, it is important to disconnect the AC power to your Mac, this helps to reset the FireWire port(s).
Do you have TTP or DW, both of which you could use to try to mount it.
It is also possible that you have a bad cable or a bad port, do other FW devices work?
-mj
[email protected]

External Hard Drive not mounting on bootup

I have a USB2.0 Hard Drive formatted with ntfs, which holds my music. I have an fstab entry for it using ntfs-3g and I can mount it fine after booting up. But the drive doesn't automatically mount like it should. It looks like the system is mounting the fstab entries before it is finished detecting my external drive. Anything I can do to fix this?

fwojciec wrote:I let my external ntfs drive be mounted by hal - I have no entry for it in /etc/fstab. In order to have it mounted with read/write privileges I had to create a hal policy like this wiki page describes: http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/HAL … ntfs-3g.29
I'm not sure if this solution is what you're looking for though...
I actually tried using hal to do it and it didn't work right for some reason.

External hard drives not appearing on Desktop

I have three external hard drives, none of which are showing up on my Desktop. All three drives are mounted, and I can navigate to them through the sidebar in Finder windows, and the contents of the drives are all fine and intact. In Finder preferences under "Show these items on the desktop", "External disks" is ticked. I've tried unmounting the drives using Disk Utility, then mounting them again, but they still don't appear. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

Create a new admin user account, log into it, setup Finder's prefs to show all HDs, and see if the issue persists.

External hard drive not mounting on emac, works fine on windows xp machine

I am running an emac 1ghz powerpc G4 with 768MB sdram and version 10.4.9
I have an external hard drive that up to a few days ago ran smoothly. It contains all my itunes, iphoto, and imovie libraries.
Now it will not mount. It lights up, it runs, etc but I can't use it. I tried restarting machine etc. No avail.
it is a usb drive. Today I took it downstairs and plugged it into my daughter's windows xp machine. It recognized it right away (I was shocked too) and everything is there good as before.
I plugged it into every usb port in the emac and nothing. I am using the same cord on the xp and it works fine.
Any idea what it could be and how to fix it. I read on hear a lot to use disk utility. However when I run it it just freezes. When I turn that external drive off disk utility runs fine.

I am running an emac 1ghz powerpc G4 with 768MB sdram
and version 10.4.9
I have an external hard drive that up to a few days
ago ran smoothly. It contains all my itunes, iphoto,
and imovie libraries.
Now it will not mount. It lights up, it runs, etc
but I can't use it. I tried restarting machine etc.
No avail.
it is a usb drive. Today I took it downstairs and
plugged it into my daughter's windows xp machine. It
recognized it right away (I was shocked too) and
everything is there good as before.
I plugged it into every usb port in the emac and
nothing. I am using the same cord on the xp and it
works fine.
Any idea what it could be and how to fix it. I read
on hear a lot to use disk utility. However when I
run it it just freezes. When I turn that external
drive off disk utility runs fine.
Your external drive is formatted FAT32 or FAT, or the Windows box would have a problem seeing it. (Unless you have MacDrive on that box, that is.)
If it is formatted FAT32 or FAT, you are NOT going to be able to use Disk Utility (or any other Mac utility) on that drive. Disk Utility doesn't do FAT.
I'd copy the contents of the drive elsewhere then start up Disk Utility first and then plug the drive into the Mac and format it FAT32 from Disk Utility. If that doesn't work, format it FAT32 on the Windows machine. Note: if this drive is larger than 32 GB, you're going to need to generate two or more partitions, as while WinXP can read FAT32 partitions larger than 32 GB, it can't create them. Macs and Linux boxes can create large FAT32 partitions. Second note: if the drive is smaller than 4 GB, you might want to think about formatting it FAT instead of FAT32. Indeed, Windows may insist. Do not let Windows format it NTFS; Macs can read NTFS volumes, but can't write to them.

Please help... External Hard Drive not mounting

Hello, Please help me if you can:
I have all of my data backed up onto a Seagate External Hard Drive, purchased just a few months ago. I just got a new laptop (MacBook Air) and need to get my data off of my hard drive, but it isn't showing up on my Desktop or Finder. It shows up in Disk Utility, but when I ask it to "repair" it says:
"Invalid B-tree node size
The volume could not be verified completely.
Volume repair complete.Updating boot support partitions for the volume as required.Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk. Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files."
The problem started after I added some data to it - I accidentally unplugged the Drive without Ejecting first. The next time I plugged it in it allowed me to view my files but not add anything else to the Drive, and now when I plug it in it doesn't even appear. I am running Lion.
I would be happy to back up the files as it says, but as it doesn't show up anywhere I can't find the files to access. Can anyone help me find a way to get the files off of the disk, or fix the disk so that it is readable?

Hi, Brian, and welcome to the Discussions!
You might perhaps launch System Profiler (from Applications/Utilities) and see if the device is listed there under the FireWire heading in Hardware Overview.
Can you hear the LaCie spin up when powered on?
You might download the free trial version of Data Rescue II and launch it to see if it recognizes the drive. This software often does when DW or Disk Utility won't. If it does, run a scan with it to see if the data on the volume is viewable.
You can test the FireWire port with another Firewire device, or by hooking up to another Mac via a FW cable and trying to boot into FW Target Disk Mode. Visibly check the port at the Mac end first to insure that there are no bent pins at the connector (so you won't damage another device).
You can try resetting a "dead" FireWire port by shutting down, unplugging the external FireWire devices, and disconnecting the Mac's power cord for thirty minutes or so. Before doing this, run Disk Utility's Repair Permissions process on the startup volume first, to see if that corrects it.
Gary
1GHz DP G4 Quicksilver 2002, 400MHz B&W rev.2 G3, Mac SE30 Mac OS X (10.4.5) 5G iPod, Epson 2200 & R300 & LW Select 360 Printers, Epson 3200 Scanner

WD Elements External Hard Drive not mounting

My external hard drive is not mounting it is connected by via USB connected directly to my Macbook. When I connect it error "The disk you inserted is not redable by this computer". I can see it on Disk Utility however all options are grayed out. I also tried connecting it to my sister's windows machine same thing not mounting. I've tried this suggestion http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2176 but I got an error "Error: -69877: Couldn't open device".
By the way it's a self powered 2.2TB WD Elements
Badly needed help!

I had the same info (with a WD essentials encolusre where I just replaced a 750 with a 2TB), but after closing both DiskDrill and Disk utility, the terminal worked. So have a look if there are any other disk monitorings on.
good luck

External Hard Drive not showing on desktop

Hi,
I'm using a macbook pro, 15", and have been using it with my external hard drive for the past 2 months.
This afternoon, I was using the external, where i have all my music and photos stored, and it was working fine. I left the computer on sleep for about 2 hours (all programs that have stuff on the external I made sure to quit before), and when I got back the "icon" for the back up disk was slightly more "invisible" on my desktop and time machine informed me that the latest back up failed. When I tried to eject it (nothing on the disk was being used) it said it couldnt be ejected because the disk was in use.
I tried to eject again, same thing, so I restarted the computer. When I restarted the computer the external harddrive icon did not show up on my desk top. I tried pulling it out and plugging it in a few times, the disk will start up, but not load onto my desk top.
HELP!!!
the external hard drive is a Western Digital "my Passport"
Thank you!

Danja.schluter wrote:
if I repair the disk, will i lose everything on it?
Running Disk Repair will not harm your data, the idea is to repair and make it functional again.
If successful I would make a back up of that data because you may be skating on thin ice.

External hard drive NOT mounting to mac

I have never had problems with my external hard drive (I just bought it a few months ago), but suddenly it is not mounting on the iMacs at my work or my Macbook pro at home. The drive does NOT show up in Disc Utility, but when the drive is connected via USB, the light on the drive comes on and it is clearly operating. It will not mount on any mac product all of a sudden. I have no idea why this is happening someone PLEASE HELP thanks

you have a MacBook Pro, we are Mac Pro users.
It uses bus-power? has its own power brick?
Formatted for Mac (HFS)? Used on PC Windows and Mac?
Do you have it backed up?
Has there been an inadvertent outage or crash?
MacBook Pro

Projects from external hard drive not opening on desktop. Please help.

I use my external hard drive to create, edit and save all my imovie projects. In this external drive I have all my raw clips, events, projects etc.
My home computer is my primary place of work, and I am now trying to open a half edited project from my external hard drive on my daughter's mac. Note this project was saved in imovie 8 and she has imovie 9, although I cannot see this being an issue.
Can anyone else suggest why imovie only opens my events, but doesn't open the project in the project library. I have tried copying the .rcproject from the external hard drive to the desktop along with the events, but to no avail. Any further suggestions, I have a pending deadline.
Thanks.

You should be able to get this to work.
I would suggest the following:
1) Move the RCPROJECT file from the desktop to the Movies/iMovie Projects folder.
2) Use the Events on the external drive. Your project will be pointing to the external drive. It will not know how to find anything on the internal drive.
Then restart iMovie.
This should work, as iMovie is forward compatible. However, once you open the project in iMovie 09, you will no longer be able to open it in iMovie 08. (Of course, you could make a copy of it in its current state.)
I am less sure about your events. Your events will be converted to iMovie 09 format. I don't think you will be able to still open them in iMovie 08. You might if you delete all the cache and thumbnail folders and let iMovie 08 regenerate these, but I am not sure. Your best bet is to upgrade to iMovie 09 or better yet, iMovie 11 on your home computer.

External Hard Drives not Mounting after Yosemite Upgrade

I've just upgraded to Yosemite, and none of my external (USB) hard drives are mounting (they don't even appear in Disk Utility).
Any ideas?

MacBook Pro 2009. 250 SD, HD 8Gb Ram.
I have had this issue for about a year...with no resolve!
Apple and the User community have not been able to solve issue.
I have had to work around it since the Oct 2013 Mavericks upgrade which “killed” (rendered unmountable) both my USB and Optical drives.
Hundreds of replies and remedies have not corrected my issue. Hundreds of replies stating that if there was a global issue it would of been fixed by Apple, not true. And dismissive replies stating that there must be a hardware issue are very discouraging.
So now, hoping to help the voiceless masses, I'm forced to share my experience.
As I stated, I have been having the issue since one of the Mavericks upgrades. The upgrade rendered externally attached drives unmountable...They are all seen in Disk Utility. They are just not mountable. Regardless of the flavor of the disk format, either Mac or PC, they are found, seen and refuse to mount. I can see them using Terminal commands, I can see them in System Report. I can reset all the memory I want...turn it off, reset, sleep, turn on, restart...NOPE...And the optical drive takes in disks but ejects them after an attempted mounting. Keep in mind, there are no physical issues with either USB or optical drives.
So now...I have had enough and need to correct the issue or buy a new equipment - starting to get into software development and need working equipment!!!
For the past month, I have been visiting the Apple store to assist in my issues...Back Story: I'm an IT Field Tech for the largest department store in the country and I have the good fortune of dropping in the Apple store anytime I want...The Geniuses booted the MB with a bootable image of Mavericks, and the USB and Optical drives WORKED fine...So, after I had stumped the Geniuses with my problems, we agreed that we would attempt to format and re-image the MacBook...Fine, do it, it's backed-up, how you ask? - Via my wireless My Book Live 3T drive, which only took 24 hours to backup, AKA Time Machine!
Great news! The re-image of Mavericks proved to work! I WAS able to mount external drives attached! How is that possible? Don't know, don't care! It just worked! So happy!
But wait! I then took the laptop home. Connected to my WiFi, to update Mavericks to the latest version...Good so far! Then it came time for a Time Machine restore, AKA Migration Assistance restore...So, I proceeded to migrate data back to my MB via wireless drive, good so far, booted in Migration Assistant, and I chose to restore everything except the network files, thinking that may be an issue...22 Hours later, the MB migrated without issue...all apps and personal files had migrated! YAY!
BUT NOW THE USB AND OPTICAL DRIVES FAILED TO MOUNT!!!
Great now what? I know, I will just re-image and start again...WAIT, I don't have a Mavericks Install Disk, no problem, I will just create a bootable USB drive with the Mavericks Install Image I downloaded onto my MB this month...NO YOU CANNOT, because you have no use of the USB drives!...And, Apple stopped making OS CDs back in 2009...Oh, and that wouldn't of done me any good, because the optical dive was unusable, anyway!
SO, back to the Apple store with my head hanging! At this point, Yosemite came out the previous Thursday, so no more Mavericks images, great! Perhaps the new OS will alleviate my nightmare!!!!...So, they re-imaged my Mac with Mavericks, drives worked again! SO, I took my MB home and attempted to download the new OS, Yosemite...which only took 2 days due to the amount of traffic on Apple's servers!...Anyway, Yosemite finally installed without out issue! Drives still worked! And so, I shutdown and restarted the system...No issues, USB and optical drives worked beautifully! Yay, Yosemite!...Fixed all my troubles!!!...Not so fast...
And so, I, again, attempted to do a Time Machine restore, via WiFi, this time it took 24 hours to restore...AND it worked! All apps and personal files transferred without issue, So happy! Put the laptop in Sleep and left it home and went to work! Came back from work, tested the system without issues. Rebooted...USB and Optical drive are NOT MOUNTABLE!
So now, what is the file that the restore keeps pushing to my MB that kills the USB and optical drives?
I would just stop restoring from a Time Machine backup, but the only way to get into the TM image is to use Migration Assistant. I cannot view the date in time of the image in TM's Star Wars time line. So, I'm forced to back up everything from the image in Migration Assistance. Not sure that it being an encrypted image has anything to do with it...
...Regardless, what is being “restored” to the MB that continues to configure the OS in such a way that makes all external drives unmountable...keep in mind, my external keyboard, hub and mouse are usable via USB.

External Hard Drive not Mounting any more

Hi all,
I have noticed since couple of kernel updates, my external hard drive - plugged via USB doesn't get mounted any more. To access the drive I need to reboot the computer with the hard drive switch on.
See below for the dmesg output, regular usb keys get mounted normally, I have check autofs set up and it seems fine compare to the wiki,
Many thanks for taking the time to read my topic,
Looking forward for your replies,
[ 37.753349] usb 2-6: new high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd
[ 38.139340] usbcore: registered new interface driver uas
[ 38.175765] Initializing USB Mass Storage driver...
[ 38.175829] usbcore: registered new interface driver usb-storage
[ 38.175830] USB Mass Storage support registered.
[ 38.240086] scsi8 : usb-storage 2-6:1.0
[ 38.240226] usbcore: registered new interface driver ums-cypress
[ 44.726882] scsi 8:0:0:0: Direct-Access ST325082 3A PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 44.727768] sd 8:0:0:0: [sde] 488397168 512-byte logical blocks: (250 GB/232 GiB)
[ 44.728724] sd 8:0:0:0: [sde] Write Protect is off
[ 44.728727] sd 8:0:0:0: [sde] Mode Sense: 33 00 00 00
[ 44.729729] sd 8:0:0:0: [sde] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 44.753026] sde: sde1
[ 75.466677] usb 2-6: reset high-speed USB device number 4 using ehci_hcd
[ 75.591741] sd 8:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI disk
[ 2243.446832] usb 2-6: USB disconnect, device number 4
[ 2278.086455] usb 2-6: new high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd
[ 2278.211117] scsi9 : usb-storage 2-6:1.0
[ 2285.078375] scsi 9:0:0:0: Direct-Access ST325082 3A PQ: 0 ANSI: 0
[ 2285.079220] sd 9:0:0:0: [sde] 488397168 512-byte logical blocks: (250 GB/232 GiB)
[ 2285.080209] sd 9:0:0:0: [sde] Write Protect is off
[ 2285.080212] sd 9:0:0:0: [sde] Mode Sense: 33 00 00 00
[ 2285.081222] sd 9:0:0:0: [sde] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 2285.101763] sde: sde1
[ 2285.105212] sd 9:0:0:0: [sde] Attached SCSI disk
[ 2316.159787] usb 2-6: reset high-speed USB device number 5 using ehci_hcd

Yes I have checked System Settings -> Removable Devices - but there is no option for an external hard drive.
And yes it is a ntfs drive, but as I said it worked before couples of updates ago, and just to be sure I checked ntfs-3g - it is installed.
Oh, and I should have said, checking /dev/by-label the drive appear there once turn on, but doesn't get mounted, I use to have a line in the fstab file, but I removed it because it tried to mount it during booting process, and it work anyway.
Any other advice?
Last edited by sweetthdevil (2012-01-24 19:03:00)

External hard drive not mounting on desktop or being accessible - help!!!

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